Network Associates Inc. last month released its Network Performance Orchestrator (nPO) platform for centrally managing enterprise network performance and security. The company also announced nPO Manager and nPO Visualizer. NPO Manager is an appliance that can connect to Network Associates’ Sniffer Distributed management appliances. The package provides centralized authentication, configuration management, profile management, resource management and alarm management. NPO Visualizer can be accessed via a Web browser and generates reports on network performance, bandwidth utilization, usage trends and top alarms. NPO Manager costs US$30,000, and pricing for nPO Visualizer starts at US$40,000.
Bridge-building
Network Appliance Inc. last month took its first plunge into the storage-area network (SAN) market by announcing a line of storage devices that can perform both file- and block-level data transfers from a single pool of disk drives. Analysts said the new products, which come under the moniker of Fabric Attached Storage 900 (FAS900), are the first to eliminate the differences between SAN and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Until now, users have had to bridge that gap by outfitting disk arrays with a gateway device. NAI upgraded its Data OnTap software to support Fibre Channel SANs in addition to NAS applications.
Getting an advantage
Compuware Corp. is releasing the next version of its NetworkVantage management software, which can be used to monitor traffic that flows through an organization’s wide area network (WAN). In the latest version, made available to customers last month, the software has the ability to gauge network traffic derived from the use of instant messaging applications as well as online file-sharing services, two applications that are blamed for hogging valuable bandwidth. Instant messaging and file-swapping are just two of more than 2,000 applications and protocols that can be monitored using NetworkVantage. The product is available for Windows XP Professional in addition to Windows 2000 and NT. Pricing starts at US$26,500.