Vendor Briefings

LANDesk Upgrades Management Suites
LANDesk Software (http://www.landesk.com) has been a consistent innovator in the enterprise IT management space. The company was instrumental in developing the desktop management category in the early 1990s and continues to focus on systems configuration and securitymanagement solutions. I spoke with Dave R.Taylor, LANDesk's vice president-of worldwide marketing, about a major product launch that includes upgrades to LANDesk Management Suite and LANDesk Security Suite. Considered LANDesk's flagship product, Management Suite 8.6 incorporates LANDesk Management Gateway technology and supports Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) to enable remote discovery and access without regard to system state or OS. Security Suite 8.6 embodies what Dave describes as LANDesk's approach to security "from an IT operations manager's perspective." That focus has produced a layered, horizontally integrated suite of tools that defend against a number of internal and external threats to system security, including malicious attacks and system intrusion, spyware, adware, and viruses. In addition to providing one solution that delivers targeted tools for the most important security concerns, Security Suite 8.6 also lets you scan computers that attempt to connect to your network and quarantine any system that doesn't meet your security policy standards, letting you secure your enterprise environment through intelligent control of its endpoints. —Dianne Russell

Stop Throwing Cash at Network Failures
Do you work for a company that throws hardware at server or device problems? Server costs have been dropping dramatically, yet the costs of maintaining those accumulated servers remains flat. As a result, per-server administration costs are rising. We recently spoke with Lori Matthews of Avocent Technologies (http://www.avocent.com), which released DSView 3, management software that provides secure browser-based control of all the local and remote servers and devices in your IT infrastructure. Lori described the advantages of DSView 3, foremost of which is the product's hub-and-spoke architecture: The hub is a central database, and the spokes are remote databases, adding up to a fully redundant, replicating database system that provides real-time updates, load-balancing, and failover across multiple sites. This configuration lets you control the status and health of everything in your network—thanks to the company's Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)—so you need no longer throw money at network failures. —Jason Bovberg

Symantec Delivers Large-Scale Backup and Recovery
Enterprise Windows environments need to back up and restore data on multiple OSs and servers with minimal overhead and disruption to operations. Michael Adams, group manager for Symantec's (http://www.symantec.com) NetBackup product marketing, spoke with me about NetBackup 6.0 and how it provides integrated, disk-based backup and recovery for such environments. NetBackup 6.0 brings "bare-metal restore into the NetBackup infrastructure" and can now restore in a Windows-only environment without requiring the use of a UNIX management server, as it did in earlier versions, says Michael. Version 6.0 also includes a Web-based management console called NetBackup Operations Manager, along with advanced reporting features previously available separately. "NetBackup collects a lot of information, but the problem has been how to display it to the end user." NetBackup Operations Manager, Michael says, "gives people an easier way to view what's going on in their backup environment." —Anne Grubb

Detect and Remove Spyware on Enterprise Networks
Few threats cause as much frustration to IT administrators as spyware, and since spyware enters a network through unpatched systems, it seems only logical to combine patching and antispyware technologies into one tool. That's what Shavlik Technologies (http://www.shavlik.com) has done with its recently released enterpriseclass antispyware product, Shavlik NetChk Spyware. NetChk Spyware integrates fully with Shavlik's HFNetChkPro patch-management solution to create a comprehensive and easy-to-use antispyware and patching solution that administrators can manage via the company's NetChk Protect security-management console. (NetChk Spyware can also run as a standalone product.) NetChk Spyware provides on-demand and scheduled scanning operations that detect unwanted programs, then reports upto-date statistics about the severity of the contamination. The antispyware product classifies spyware as a threat either to confidentiality, data integrity, availability, or productivity, so IT administrators can prioritize remediation efforts to return infected systems to their uncontaminated state. —Gayle Rodcay