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LANDesk Debuts New and Updated Management Tools

Intel spin-off LANDesk announced this week that it is shipping Server Manager 8.5, which provides significant enhancements to the seven-year-old server management tool.

Highlights of the latest release include the ability to discover blade servers via ICMP scans, a new simplified performance dashboard for quick server status and alerts and an upgraded remote control feature that works at the application layer in order to prevent system crashes.

Company officials touted the updated remote control capability, which functions at the application layer instead of at the hardware level, as a major improvement in version 8.5. “You can’t at any time cause a blue screen,” says Mark Christensen, senior product manager at LANDesk. “If something happens to your remote control session, it just stops.”

Another key feature, the new, simplified dashboard, provides a handy interface for administrators that runs in Internet Explorer or Mozilla. “A lot of administrators wanted to be able to look at the health of any server from anywhere at any time,” says Dave Taylor, LANDesk’s vice president of worldwide marketing.

The company’s roots in systems management began 13 years ago with Intel’s pioneering LANDesk network management tools. Intel spun off the company two years ago.

Server Manager is the Salt Lake City, Utah-based company's second recent release. LANDesk last month shipped the LANDesk Security Suite.

The security suite is designed to enable customers to proactively manage and defend against various types of threats, including malicious attacks, adware, system intrusion and spyware. LANDesk Security Suite provides enterprise-wide spyware detection and removal, patch management capabilities, a security threat analyzer and application denial functions. The suite also features a connection control manager capability to control networks a client can access, verify lists of authorized connections and enable or disable ports and other access point.

LANDesk Security Suite costs $59 per node for the first year and a follow-on annual subscription costs $29 per node. LANDesk Server Manager 8.5 costs $299 per server.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.

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