Robin Wauters

Fujifilm has announced its largest virtualization implementation to date.

Clarian Health has replaced its legacy PACS with a fully virtualized Synapse system and a complete disaster recovery/ business continuance system.  Since completing the rollout of this comprehensive initiative, Clarian has reduced its overall costs while also documenting increased efficiencies across the health system that are enabling improved patient care.

The initial Clarian Heath Partners PACS project included 5 hospitals and 9 outpatient imaging centers in the Indianapolismetropolitan area. Fujifilm replaced more than 80 legacy servers with just six virtualized servers to run Synapse PACS for all of these facilities.  Currently about 700,000 yearly exams are being hosted with capacity for up to one million exams that will require no additional investment or modification since it is a fully scalable solution.  By significantly reducing the amount of physical servers that need to be procured and maintained, Clarian is benefiting from notable cost savings as well as “green” advantages like reduced power and cooling requirements that are critical to Clarian’s long-term goals.  All of Clarian’s hospitals have also noted the proven ability of the virtualized Synapse system to significantly reduce report turnaround times anywhere from one to five hours.

In addition to rolling out the Synapse system in a virtualized environment, Fujifilm also implemented a complete disaster recovery/business continuance plan for Clarian, something the facility did not previously have.  The entire Synapse system can be failed over to another datacenter in less than an hour, enabling the health system to provide uninterrupted care.

Citrix today announced immediate availability of five new Citrix® NetScaler Application Firewall appliances designed to bring a new level of security to public and private clouds and web applications.

Each of the new appliances is built on the Citrix NetScaler MPX hardware platform, the application acceleration, load balancing and web-security system that powers thousands of enterprise datacenters and most of the world’s largest clouds and websites. With the introduction of this new offering, Citrix now provides solutions ranging from the 10 Mbps Citrix NetScaler VPX virtual appliance to a record breaking 5 Gbps with the NetScaler MPX hardware appliance – meeting the needs of small and large enterprises, managed security services providers (MSSPs) and cloud providers. In fact, the new appliances outperform throughput levels from the nearest competitor by two times across multiple performance metrics.

In addition to detecting and blocking application threats targeting traditional web applications, NetScaler Application Firewall incorporates advanced protections for Web 2.0 applications and services. The proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies among application developers is driving the need for more sophisticated security protections and greater native fluency of XML-based applications. NetScaler Application Firewall performs comprehensive HTML and XML security checks including:

• XML denial of service (XDoS) to protect servers from malicious XML payloads by enforcing limits on the payload structure
• Schema validation and format checks to verify proper data types on SOAP messages and XML payloads
• SQL injection and cross site scripting
• Attachment checks to block attachments with malicious executables or viruses
• WS-I basic profile compliance

The NetScaler Application Firewall is a comprehensive and powerful security solution that blocks known and unknown attacks against web and web services applications. It utilizes a positive security model allowing only correct application behavior, without requiring constant updates of attack signatures. The NetScaler Application Firewall is ICSA certified and provides protection against a wide array of malicious attack techniques targeting application vulnerabilities, confidential data theft, denial of service, and web site defacement. It is available on NetScaler MPX hardware appliances. NetScaler Application Firewall is also included with the NetScaler VPX software appliance, further enhancing the company’s ability to offer cloud and web security as part of the industry’s only end-to-end networking virtualization solution.

NetScaler Application Firewall is now available on MPX 5500, MPX 7500, MPX 9500, MPX 10500 and MPX 12500 appliances through Citrix Solution Advisors worldwide. Pricing begins at $20,000. Pay-as-You-Grow licensing is available for MPX 7500, MPX 9500 and MPX 10500 appliances.

nCircle today announced the release of new audience-specific security risk and compliance dashboards and enhanced auditing of virtual IT infrastructures.

The new dashboards are part of nCircle’s self-service security and compliance portal and provide role-based visibility into an organization’s IT governance, risk and compliance (IT GRC) processes. nCircle also delivers security and compliance auditing of VMWare-based virtual infrastructures, a key area of investment in today’s enterprises.

Suite360 now delivers the industry’s most advanced security risk and compliance analytics.

User-programmable dashboards deliver the right information to the right audience:

· Risk and compliance trends for executives

· Current compliance posture vs. target, with detailed drill down for auditors

· Instant visibility to security issues across the enterprise for IT security

· Prioritized remediation instructions with role-based asset views for IT operations

For the first time, enterprises can visit a central portal to get the actionable security and compliance information that matters to them. Asset views enable analysis of security and compliance audit data by any business dimension, including asset type, asset owner, geography or business unit. Annotation capabilities enable administrators to explain deviations directly in the reports for improved understanding by multiple audiences. Suite360 enables all IT audiences to view the security and compliance status of their networks and clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts and investments.

The use of virtualized infrastructure in the enterprise has grown rapidly in recent years and is now a critical tool for enterprises, enabling server consolidation, more efficient data center management and other cost reductions. However, the spread of virtualization has created new security and compliance issues, requiring continuous auditing of the virtual infrastructure to maintain security and compliance.

nCircle Suite360 now audits the full virtual infrastructure, from virtual machines to the hypervisor, on VMWare-based systems. Suite360 audits the configurations of an organization’s virtual infrastructure and compares them to Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks, or hardening guides, to ensure the security of virtual machines and their hypervisor. The CIS benchmarks are accepted best practices for secure operation of VMware virtual machines and hypervisors. Additionally, Suite360 can continuously monitor hypervisors and virtual machines to ensure configurations remain compliant with the “gold standard” build, making the administration of these systems considerably easier and more efficient.

Skytap today announced breakthrough network automation capabilities that simplify and accelerate the creation, migration and deployment of multi-tier enterprise applications in the cloud. These features empower IT organizations to create virtual data centers with advanced network topologies and enable functional users to deploy them with an easy-to-use, self-service interface. New capabilities include:

• Support for advanced, multi-tier network topologies
• Ability for users to deploy virtual data centers with multiple networks using Skytap’s self-service Web user interface
• Comprehensive network security and policy management using virtual routers

In the same way data center automation transformed physical data center management, Skytap’s network automation capabilities are transforming the way enterprise applications are deployed in the cloud.

Enterprise applications require complex networking topologies such as clustering, fail-over, shared resources, and multiple subnets with firewalls and security controls. Today, IT organizations spend an enormous amount of money and time installing physical hardware, deploying software, managing network changes and applying security patches. Functional users are often frustrated with delays due to network provisioning, set-up, performance and scalability issues.

Skytap’s new network automation capabilities enable a transformative break from the status quo. With this release, Skytap enables IT organizations to move multi-tiered enterprise applications with clustering and fail-over networking capabilities into the cloud with point-and-click ease.

Skytap allows IT organizations to create “ready to run” virtual data centers with advanced networking topologies, customizable security policies, and scalable computing capacity. Functional users can utilize the self-service Web interface to deploy those virtual data centers immediately. As application needs change, IT organizations can easily add or remove networks, change server and storage capacity, and rapidly adjust security and access policies. Skytap’s networking capabilities bring unprecedented power, scale, ease-of-use, time-to-value and cost efficiencies to cloud-based application deployments.

The following features in this release enable and simplify the deployment of complex enterprise applications in the cloud:

Advanced, Multi-Tier Network Topologies

• Create server machines with multiple network adapters; configure multiple networks in a virtual data center configuration
• Create server clusters, fail-over configurations and shared services to support highly available applications in the cloud
• Add virtual routers, firewalls and gateways to virtual data center configurations

Self-Service Virtual Data Center Deployment

• Define and deploy complex networks with Skytap’s Web interface and REST-based API
• Snapshot entire virtual data centers with advanced network topologies and share it with remote teams using a simple Web user interface
• Integrated role-based access to allow users to deploy virtual data center templates without requiring IT operational support for provisioning

Comprehensive Network Security and Policy Management

• Create virtual private clouds by connecting Skytap multi-network virtual data center configurations with existing in house enterprise networks
• Configure and manage routing and networking policies with virtual networking appliances
• Customize application and network security policies including support for ‘de-militarized zones’ (DMZs)