New Products

The new Centrify Suite 2008 is an integrated family of Active Directory-based auditing, access control and identity management solutions for cross-platform environments. The applications also help address regulatory compliance, says its maker Centrify, by adhering to requirements from SOX, PCI, HIPAA, GLBA and FISMA. The Standard Edition contains two applications: DirectControl, which secures non-Microsoft platforms using the same authentication and Group Policy services found in a Windows environment, and DirectAuthorize, which provides centralized role-based entitlement management for fine-grained user access and privilege rights on UNIX and Linux systems. The Enterprise Edition adds DirectAudit, which offers auditing, logging and real-time monitoring of user activity on non-Microsoft systems. The Application Edition, meanwhile, is for organizations using Web/Java applications, databases or enterprise applications, such as SAP or PeopleSoft.

www.centrify.com

It appears that our constant pestering for Linux support on various devices is paying off. The latest manufacturer to announce Linux support is Primera Technology, maker of a range of disc publishers, which announced support for its Bravo II, BravoPro, Bravo XR and Bravo XRP CD/DVD/BD devices. Primera says that its full-featured Linux printer drivers can be integrated with open-source or commercially available disc-burning engines easily. The drivers can be downloaded from the firm's Web site.

www.primera.com

StarOffice, the enterprise-oriented sibling of OpenOffice.org, has been upgraded to Version 9. This open-source office productivity suite contains the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, Base database and Draw drawing/graphics applications. StarOffice Version 9 adds features, such as Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail and Lightning for calendaring, an enterprise migration tool and various extensions for blogging, communicating, wiki publishing and PDF editing. Further, like OpenOffice.org 3.0, StarOffice 9 can read and write Microsoft Office .docx files. A range of support models are available; indemnification against intellectual property lawsuits is included in each. StarOffice comes in Linux, Solaris and Windows flavors.

www.sun.com/staroffice

The new Varnish 2.0 from Linpro is an open-source reverse-Web accelerator for high-content Web sites that was designed from the ground up for incoming traffic and not as a client-side proxy or origin server. Varnish temporarily stores the most frequently requested pages in cache memory and offers tools for identifying which pages should and should not be cached, and if they are cached, when to delete them and present fresh content. The result, says Linpro, is a 90% reduction in server requirements. Varnish 2.0 offers new features like improved compression, expanded support for filtering Web content for caching, ESI language support, tighter integration with CMS solutions, load-balancing support, better scaling and improved accelerator tuning. Varnish runs on Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD.

varnish-cache.com

The new Hot Copy from R1Soft is a Linux command-line utility that takes on-line snapshots of disks or volumes on a Linux server. Because Hot Copy does not use LVM, it can work on any Linux system and with any block device. Some sample applications are turning legacy backups into on-line ones, creating a copy before running or testing dangerous scripts and commands (for example, rm -Rf), running fsck safely while the filesystem is mounted and viewing changes on systems. Features include instant, non-interrupting point-in-time snapshots of any block device, point-in-time snapshots with the system in a totally consistent state, copy-on-write snapshots, writeable snapshots and no need for dedicated snapshot devices or storage.

www.r1soft.com

TotalView Technologies recently upgraded to Version 8.6 its TotalView tool for source code analysis and memory error detection. Most notably, this latest release adds TVScript, a new troubleshooting utility offering a streamlined mechanism for automated and unattended debugging. In addition, the new SSH-based Remote Display Client allows users to set up and operate securely an interactive graphical debugging session on remote systems located anywhere. The Remote Display Client is available for 32- and 64-bit Linux and Windows.

www.totalviewtech.com