Prevent Spam from Entering Your Inbox
BlueCat Networks, Meridius Anti-Spam Relay,
http://www.bluecatnetworks.com, 905-882-5691,
[email protected]
Windows & .NET Magazine reader Nathan Smith from Des Moines nominates BlueCat Networks' Meridius Anti-Spam Relay as a top product. He says, "Meridius's antispam features save me between 20 and 40 minutes a day. A rule in Outlook causes all spam-tagged messages to go to a spam folder. I almost never have false positives, so I can quickly delete the contents of the spam folder and I don't waste time weeding through spam in my Inbox."
The Meridius rack-mount appliance sits in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), and your mail servers are protected behind a firewall. Spammers can't use your company's bandwidth and hardware resources to distribute spam across the Internet. The Zero Administration Quarantine feature isolates spam and stops it from reaching intended recipients. The Meridius Management Console Wizards let you define a secure relay policy to prevent hijacking attempts. The appliance includes an onboard caching DNS server. SMTP authentication support lets users remotely connect to Meridius to send messages.
Monitor Bandwidth
Smartways Technology, LANSpy Bandwidth Monitor (SME),
http://www.lanspy.com, [email protected]
Smartways Technology's LANSpy Bandwidth Monitor (SME) lets you monitor bandwidth usage on your network. You can monitor as many as 100 devices and ports. The Quick Config Wizard and Automatic Network Discovery features help you install and configure the solution. The wizard scans your network and monitors all the devices it discovers. You can then choose which ports on the device to monitor and how often you want automatically generated Web pages and graphs to publish. LANSpy (SME) automatically generates an index page listing all of your graphs. A data collection module runs constantly and collects and analyzes data throughput information in 5-minute intervals. You can discover new routers or switch equipment to monitor. John Thompson of Carbondale, Kansas, highly recommends LANSpy (SME). He says, "I recently had to provide bandwidth utilization reports to upper management on our T1 line between the corporate and disaster-recovery sites. With LANSpy (SME) I was able to give them easy-to-read graphs, showing that the line was saturated. I was able to do all of this with the 14-day trial version. We have since purchased a full version, and I am now monitoring multiple switch ports and router interfaces. LANSpy (SME) saved me time and is very affordable."
LANSpy (SME) runs on Windows XP/2000/NT/9x systems. Pricing is $120 for 50 ports.
Manage Distributed File Storage
NuView, StorageX,
http://www.nuview.com, 281-497-0620
NuView's StorageX software lets you unify and manage distributed file storage and lets you perform data management tasks and data movement tasks and create policies to control and automate task execution. StorageX uses a global namespace to unify heterogeneous file storage that's distributed throughout the enterprise. The software presents users with a logical view of files. An administrator can add, consolidate, move, rebalance, and reconfigure storage without affecting how users view or access that storage. A Windows & .NET Magazine reader, who works for a manufacturing company, writes that his company had previously deployed Microsoft Dfs and his company's DFS root grew to include 1500 links. The reader says, "We shopped around and found Nuview's StorageX, which provides a better console for DFS but also does other things such as data migration, replication, and disaster recovery. It's a tool that makes DFS do what it's supposed to do."
StorageX runs on Windows XP Professional Edition or Windows 2000 Server and requires Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.5 or later. StorageX is licensed and purchased on a per-node root basis, so you need to purchase one copy for each managed file server. Contact NuView for more details.
