News

Altor Networks, a leading innovator and provider of security for virtualized data centers and clouds, today introduced the latest version of its flagship product, Altor 4.0.

This release is packed with breakthrough security innovations that leverage virtual machine introspection to bring X-Ray like visibility to internal virtual machine (VM) states, delivering accurate compliance assessment and automated security enforcement.

In addition to a comprehensive platform for protecting their virtual data center and cloud deployments, Altor customers derive immediate value from v4.0 in the form of a detailed virtual infrastructure audit and assessment of virtual machine risk states, according to common industry best-practices and leading compliance regulations.

Leveraging its unique hypervisor-based footprint, Altor 4.0 automatically detects unauthorized changes to VMs in virtual and cloud environments, and can selectively quarantine the offending VMs while alerting IT administrators about the exceptions to corporate policy.

Altor’s 4.0 also inspects all traffic to and from each VM to eliminate blind spots, and enforces policies at the global, group, and per-VM level. With the Altor 4.0, enterprises can granularly define security policies within zones of trust and precisely control how VMs within these zones can communicate with one another, ensuring isolation between and within trust levels and allowing for precise micro-segmentation.

Altor 4.0 brings forward powerful new features that automate security and compliance enforcement within virtualized datacenters and clouds. By leveraging Introspection to collect VM attributes, such as installed applications, and coupling it with Altor’s deep knowledge of the virtual network, Altor 4.0 creates a powerful database of control points by which security policies and compliance rules can be defined. Altor makes this rich data available in intuitive user interfaces (UIs) that let administrators build the entire range of policies from corporate rules on global protocol handling to discrete regulation and compliance driven policies for how VMs should be configured. Built-in templates help jumpstart the process of building policies while intuitive tools make quick work of customizing the rulesets.

Features available in the release of Altor 4.0 include:

• Visibility: full view of all inter-VM network communication. Deep knowledge of internal VM state including installed applications and services through VM Introspection.
• Compliance: enforcement of corporate and regulatory policies for required applications, services and VM settings. Segregation of duties via policy automation to ensure VMs are assigned to the right trust zones inside the virtual environment.
• Control: access control over all inter-VM network traffic via firewall policies and enforcement. Deep inspection of allowed traffic for malware suppression and intrusion detection.

For more details on this information, please visit their blog.

The Altor 4.0 is currently in beta and will be available in early Q3’10. Pricing starts at $1,500.00 per CPU socket. Evaluation copies are available at Altor’s website:

Trend Micro announced today it is broadening its virtualization security portfolio to enable enterprises to fully leverage the benefits of their desktop infrastructures.

Trend Micro’s strategy for desktop virtualization is comprehensive in terms of protection technologies, flexible in terms of deployment scenarios and proven, having been on the market securing virtual desktop environments and enabling maximum ROI since 2009. The company’s latest virtual desktop-aware product, Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.5, was also announced today and rounds out Trend Micro’s virtualization portfolio.

Because different desktop virtualization scenarios require tailored solution approaches, Trend Micro is creating products and solutions that meet varied security needs. Enterprises can choose virtual appliance-based security solutions that are more easily provisioned, managed, and can also be lighter on the host. Now, they also have the option of in-guest, agent-based desktop virtualization security solutions, which provide flexible security levels for comprehensive protection that’s backed by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network infrastructure for faster, lighter, cloud-based protection.

Ahead of the game, Trend Micro delivers security solutions tailored to the specific needs of both virtualized and physical environments:

• Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines is the industry’s first anti-malware product built on hypervisor-based APIs such as VMsafe and specifically designed to secure active and dormant virtual machines. Available since July 2009, it delivers purpose-built anti-malware for VMware environments.
• Trend Micro Deep Security, available since November 2009, is the industry’s first security solution designed to provide intrusion defense for both virtual and physical systems leveraging both VMsafe-based virtual appliances and in-guest agents.
• Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.5, announced today and scheduled to be available at the end of July, provides the industry’s first hypervisor “agnostic” endpoint protection for virtualized desktops operating in all leading virtual desktop environments.

Nimsoft, a business unit of CA Technologies, today announced that Troubadour is using the Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) to create an advanced service offering called ClientView, as part of its new virtual data center (VDC).

ClientView will provide highly scalable monitoring and alerting for customers, helping Troubadour further differentiate its extensive service offering in the marketplace. It will also provide customers with the tools they need for improving the performance and security of their critical business applications.

Troubadour provides innovative solutions for security, high availability and IP telephony to customers in the Southwestern US.  The company also helps monitor and manage mission-critical IT infrastructures.

NMS enables Troubadour to deliver a Unified Monitoring solution with a flexible pricing model that is ideal for managed service delivery. Additionally, by adding monitoring as a managed service to its list of offerings, Troubadour provides additional value that helps close new deals and retain existing business.

Prior to deploying NMS, the IT team at Troubadour used a variety of low-end monitoring systems to meet customers’ individual requests.  The team decided to take a more holistic approach in monitoring services delivered through the VDC, and evaluated a variety of solutions before selecting Nimsoft.

Constructed to initially support up to 5,000 virtual hosts, Troubadour’s VDC provides a hosted cloud environment for customers’ mission-critical systems and applications. With Nimsoft, the VDC can provide 24/7 monitoring and alerting plus dashboard-level views of customers’ individual environments. Customers can access the same dashboards over the Web any time, from any browser. They can also customize the dashboards to meet their specific business needs. Using the flexible customization features of NMS, Troubadour can even create dashboards with customer logos and branding.

DeviceVM earlier this week announced a $10 million strategic investment led by SAP Ventures, a division of SAP.

Current venture capital investors also participating in the round include Storm Ventures, DFJ Dragon, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The additional funding will be used to fuel the growth of DeviceVM’s instant-on platform, Splashtop, further into the enterprise mobile market. The Splashtop instant-on platform which is pre-installed by most of the major PC vendors on their devices for the mobile enterprise user, addresses the needs of the “road warriors” of an enterprise by integrating Citrix and VMware clients to allow secure, instant access to remote virtualized desktops and applications and thereby reducing the risk of data theft.

DeviceVM delivers customized versions of Splashtop for the general mobile worker to support instant connectivity to Outlook email, calendar, contact, and tasks, as well as viewing and editing Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 documents. All versions offer instant productivity without the need to boot-up Windows. Vendors shipping these features include Acer, Dell and HP.

DeviceVM expects to be profitable by the end of calendar year 2010.

Citrix earlier this week announced the availability of Citrix XenServer 5.6.

Unveiled earlier this month at Citrix Synergy 2010, the latest release adds new features across the entire product line, enhancing the enterprise-ready, cloud-proven virtualization platform with all the capabilities needed to create and manage a virtual infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of competing products.

Last year, Citrix introduced the Free Edition of XenServer, offering an enterprise-ready, cloud-proven server virtualization platform for no cost.  Since then, XenServer has been activated for production use in more than 45,000 enterprise datacenters worldwide, including 45 percent of the Fortune 500.

Key Facts and Highlights:

·         XenServer 5.6 delivers enhanced virtualization management capabilities for both the free XenServer, as well as the more advanced Enterprise and Platinum editions.  The new low-priced XenServer Advanced Edition makes it easier and more cost-efficient for enterprise and cloud customers running free XenServer to add more advanced high availability and management capabilities.  A full list of features in each edition can be found here.

·         XenServer 5.6 is available immediately.  The new XenServer Advanced Edition is $1,000 per server, or $30 per month for cloud service providers.  The Enterprise and Platinum editions are $2,500 and $5,000 per server, respectively.

·         The XenServer Free Edition or a 30-day trial of the Platinum Edition can be downloaded here.

Parallels, the global leader in automation and virtualization software, announced recently that it is offering VMware Fusion users a free trial of Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac and a limited-time opportunity to upgrade to for $39.99 until June 15.

It includes $175 worth of additional software for free: Parallels Internet Security 2009 by Kaspersky (1 year subscription); Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 (Disk Management); and Acronis True Image 11 Home (Backup and Recovery Solutions).

Go here to take them up on it.