Citrix VDI-in-a-Box

Reduce your PC-refresh budget by deploying virtual desktops instead of more expensive PC replacements—helping you save 60 percent in VDI infrastructure.

Eliminate IT dependencies with an intuitive management console that empowers Windows administrator to handle virtualization details so you don’t need storage specialists, network administrators or virtualization experts.

Cut desktop costs by centrally consolidating patching and management. Reduce ongoing PC replacement costs by lengthening the time between PC refresh cycles. Minimize infrastructure investment by scaling incrementally without needing to overprovision for key features like high availability.

Work anywhere on any device using Windows PCs, Macs, and smart phone and tablet platforms such as Apple, Android, HP and RIM.

Provide personalized desktops customized to each user’s preferences and profile.

 Deliver a high-definition experience with performance and access fine-tuned to match the capabilities of each connection and computing device.

 Reduce downtime with the ability to manage service levels via policies and a central desktop that is always available, even if a user’s PC is not.

Enterprise-Class Performance and Capacity Management Made Easy

VKernel vOperations Suite simplifies virtualization management by visualizing, analyzing, remediating performance, capacity and cost issues detected in Hyper-V, RHEV (Q4 2011) and vSphere environments. The award-winning vOPS™ is unique in its use of a patent-pending Capacity Analytics Engine™ to deliver precise and actionable recommendations, ease of implementation, scalability, integration capabilities and quick time to value. vOPS installs as a single agent-less virtual appliance in 20 minutes and provides virtualized environments with a single pane of glass for virtualization management tasks.

VKernel vOperations Suite™

Key Features

• Single integrated virtual appliance for Hyper-V and VMware performance monitoring, optimization, chargeback, reporting and capacity planning with API access for VKernel data integration
• vOPS vSCOPE visually displays performance, capacity and cost health of all VMs in an environment, across multiple data centers and hypervisors, on one screen
• Smart Business Views that automatically group related VMs for reporting, operational tasks and user access control

Operational Benefits

• Maintain peak VM performance and eliminate firefighting caused by VM performance problems
• Optimize server and storage efficiency in virtual environments
• Assess current and future available capacity
• Streamline virtualization operations with API integration of capacity data into external applications
• Gain visibility into virtual infrastructure health and costs across multiple data centers and hypervisors

Business Benefits

• Reduce downtime and VM performance issues
• Improve confidence in virtualization infrastructure and accelerate virtualization roll out
• Decrease capital costs (server, storage and infrastructure) and operational costs(power, cooling and licensing)
• Enable virtual environment reporting for customers and management that can be embedded into external systems
• Gain cost visibility and chargeback capabilities for the virtual environment

Using this revolutionary approach, you can deploy edge services virtually in all your branch offices without having to deploy and maintain full-blown servers to run the applications, thereby delivering a branch-office-in-a-box solution to organizations. This minimizes the hardware needed at the branch office, enabling you to consolidate IT operations even further.

Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)

With the RSP, you can reduce complexity, cut costs, and simplify management, while simultaneously delivering essential local services. The RSP runs on most Steelhead appliance models to protect your existing investment and deliver better ROI.

RSP Feature Summary

• Advanced network rules capabilities
• Ability to add virtual disk space to packages
• Support for iSCSI targets from a hosted windows package
• Enhanced watchdog for higher availability
• Runs both the Steelhead Mobile Controller (SMC-VE) or Cascade® Sensor-VE
• Works virtually inpath
• Supports tested applications from a wide variety of category-leading products, as well as any VMware virtual machine

Blue Coat – MACH5

MACH5 appliances combine protocol acceleration, compression, object and byte caching and QoS to help accelerate key applications such as file access, email, web, storage replication and backup. For advanced applications, MACH5 integrates specialized live and on-demand video optimization for Adobe Flash, Windows Media, Silverlight, HTML5 and all video. MACH5 cloud-caching engines enable faster SaaS application access with no impact to the cloud infrastructure.

Save Bandwidth

Boost speed while cutting costs.

Blue Coat MACH5 combines acceleration technologies such as protocol optimization, object and byte caching, compression and traffic shaping to accelerate application delivery to remote locations.

Get up to 300x faster access to files, email, backup, disaster recovery, and data apps in consolidated IT environments. Cut bandwidth consumption by 50-90%

Blue Coat – MACH5

Blazing Fast Video

Caching and rapid delivery of web videos.

We add advanced optimization for web, video and cloud applications that deliver the next generation of WAN optimization.

Multiply bandwidth up to 1000x with more scalable video delivery.

Speed Up the WAN and the LAN

Optimization for everyone everywhere.

Deliver faster access to internal web applications as well as Internet and cloud-delivered SaaS applications. By combining these technologies into a single solution, MACH5 provides all the tools you need to optimize your entire WAN and accelerate more application types with more technologies than any other optimization solution. Optimize access for branch offices and mobile users as well.

Message Security

Hosted message security services one of the service organisations can choose. It covers all the areas of message security, plus out of the box add-ons. In that area after the review I found Google Positini doing its best. Touch wood with best cost.

In a run through the present office scenario, we have lot of single man office or mobile office. That too spread across. All the users required to access different services. Some of them are in house hosted or some of them are from internet. Companies are integrated the work flow through the devices. Here users are using different gadgets, laptop, soft phone, note book, Black Berry, I Phone, etc.

Cost Effective Communication

All the areas communication cost is an integral one. The ways of cost involved is different ways. Internet charges, telephone charges, leased line cost, ADSL cost, LAN phone cost, mobile phone cost.

Couple of Solution:-

1. Office Communicator
2. Open Source SIP based Unified Communication
3. VPN over ADSL to ADSL
4. BlackBerry

These are just high level of technologies, work each solutions depends on the size of organization, requirement, infrastructure availability, skill set. A detailed exercise required.  Out of the box, the solutions give you a major reduction in communication cost.

Pen tests can be automated with software applications or they can be performed manually. Either way, the process includes gathering information about the target before the test (reconnaissance), identifying possible entry points, attempting to break in (either virtually or for real) and reporting back the findings.

The main objective of penetration testing is to determine security weaknesses. A pen test can also be used to test an organization’s security policy compliance, its employees’ security awareness and the organization’s ability to identify and respond to security incidents.

Penetration tests are sometimes called white hat attacks because in a pen test, the good guys are attempting to break in.

Penetration Testing

Pen test strategies include: -

Targeted testing
Targeted testing is performed by the organization’s IT team and the penetration testing team working together. It’s sometimes referred to as a “lights-turned-on” approach because everyone can see the test being carried out.

External testing
This type of pen test targets a company’s externally visible servers or devices including domain name servers (DNS), e-mail servers, Web servers or firewalls. The objective is to find out if an outside attacker can get in and how far they can get in once they’ve gained access.

Internal testing
This test mimics an inside attack behind the firewall by an authorized user with standard access privileges. This kind of test is useful for estimating how much damage a disgruntled employee could cause.

Blind testing
A blind test strategy simulates the actions and procedures of a real attacker by severely limiting the information given to the person or team that’s performing the test beforehand. Typically, they may only be given the name of the company. Because this type of test can require a considerable amount of time for reconnaissance, it can be expensive.

Double blind testing
Double blind testing takes the blind test and carries it a step further. In this type of pen test, only one or two people within the organization might be aware a test is being conducted. Double-blind tests can be useful for testing an organization’s security monitoring and incident identification as well as its response procedures.

Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing Tools

1)   Nmap - Worlds Best Port Scanner

2)   Nessus - Vulnerability Scanner

3)   Metasploit - Exploit framework

4)   Pass-The-Hash - Who needs passwords?

5)   Hydra - Brute force password guessing

6)   Cain & Abel - The ultimate MITM utility

7)   Wireshark – network protocol analyzer

8)   Snort – traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks

9)   Netcat – reads and writes data across TCP or UDP network connections

10)Nikto – web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers

Unified Communication

The essence of communication is breaking down barriers. In its simplest form, the telephone breaks distance and time barriers so that people can communicate in real time or near real time when they are not together. There are now many other barriers to be overcome. People can use many different devices to communicate (wireless phones, personal digital assistants, personal computers, thin clients, etc.), and there are now new forms of communication as well, such as instant messaging. The goal of unified communications involves breaking down these barriers so that people using different modes of communication, different media, and different devices can still communicate to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Unified communication (UC) encompasses several communication systems or models including unified messaging, collaboration, and interaction systems; real-time and near real-time communications; and transactional applications.

Unified Communication

• Unified messaging focuses on allowing users to access voice, e-mail, fax and other mixed media from a single mailbox independent of the access device.
• Multimedia services include messages of mixed media types such as video, sound clips, and pictures, and include communication via short message services.
• Collaboration and interaction systems focus on applications such as calendaring, scheduling, workflow, integrated voice response, and other enterprise applications that help individuals and workgroups communicate efficiently.
• Real-time and near real-time communications systems focus on fundamental communication between individuals using applications or systems such as conferencing, instant messaging, traditional and next-generation private branch exchanges.
• Transactional and informational systems focus on providing access to m-commerce, e-commerce, voice Web-browsing, weather, stock-information, and other enterprise applications.

Branch offices it add so much values. The sizing of the product is based on the bandwidth of the branch office. Some briefing from Citrix site:-

Citrix – Branch Repeater

Citrix Branch Repeater accelerates, controls and optimizes services—desktops, applications and multimedia —for branch and mobile users. Branch Repeater, powered by SmartAcceleration and user-centric prioritization of XenDesktop, Branch Repeater evolves network-centric WAN optimization into a service-centric solution. With granular visibility, enhanced prioritization and control of service traffic, SmartAcceleration ensures brillant quality of experience (QoE) and availability while reducing bandwidth consumption and simplifying branch IT.

Comprising Branch Repeater, Branch Repeater with Windows Server, Repeater, Branch Repeater VPX and Repeater Plug-in for Citrix Receiver, this Branch Repeater product family addresses an array of enterprise acceleration needs. The AutoOptimizer engine that serves as the cornerstone of Branch Repeater architecture offers flexible deployment options: the Repeater Plug-in for Citrix Receiver accelerates service delivery to remote and mobile users, while the appliances support users in branch offices.

Smart Phones & Tablets to Work

Smart Phones & Tablets to Work

Last week I read the Toastmaster Magazine June 2011 edition. Article “Presentations TO GO!” Written by Dave Zielinski describing about couple of tools which useful for presentations and toastmaster speeches.  That is the thread I’m presenting here.

Applications which are supports smart phones & tablets. Those applications are very useful to work from smart phones & tablets. I’m listing those applications below.

• Keynote Presentation Design Software
• Documents to Go
• ThinkFree Mobile
• Prompster
• ProPrompter
• SpeechPrompter
• Dragon Dictation