19 minute read
Technology Spotlight
24 Hot Products From Channel-Friendly Vendors
From power management and processors to storage and security and much more, here’s a look at some of the new and upcoming products that have caught CRN editors’ attention.
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Arcserve OneXafe Solo
Arcserve, which earlier this year merged with StorageCraft, recently updated its OneXafe Solo data protection appliance for SMB customers or midmarket remote offi ce and branch office users. Arcserve has made the bundling of the StorageCraft Cloud to do backups now an option for customers, said Shaun Massey, director of sales engineering for North America.
“It was always bundled with the StorageCraft Cloud,” Massey told CRN. “Now it will not be included if customers want to use another cloud such as Wasabi, Microsoft Azure or AWS.”
Arcserve will soon offer support for the object lock capability in Wasabi and AWS environments to store data in a WORM (write once, read many) format, he said.
Armor Defense Armor Anywhere
Armor Defense has added two new features to its Armor Anywhere enterprise-grade cloud security and compliance offering.
Armor Anywhere with EDR provides customers with an integrated, enterprisegrade endpoint detection and response capability from VMware Carbon Black.
“If it detects threat actors trying to drop ransomware on that machine, it’s going to quarantine that machine for a bit and cut it off from the network to make sure it can’t spread the ransomware to other machines within that network,” said Ryan Smith, product evangelist. Armor Anywhere for Containers extends the ability to do threat detection and response to container environments.
Axcient x360Recover Directto-Cloud Local Cache
Axcient unveiled its new local cache addition to the company’s x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud offering to provide customers with a high-speed local recovery in case of a data outage without the need to purchase proprietary local hardware appliances.
Local cache provides the performance of a local data protection caching appliance while giving businesses their choice of local hardware ranging anywhere from a low-cost USB thumb drive to a spare NAS appliance, said Ben Nowacky, Axcient’s senior vice president of products.
With local cache, the hottest data can be recovered instantly from the on-premises device, with older data recovered from the cloud, he said.
Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response
Binary Defense plans to add Security Information and Event Management features to its Managed Detection & Response offering by the end of 2021 to expand its capabilities for SMB customers, according to CEO Mike Valentine. Regulators are increasingly requiring SMB and midmarket customers or others in their supply chain to have SIEM-like capabilities in place to protect their business.
Smaller customers aren’t prepared either fi nancially or from a staffi ng perspective to deploy the existing SIEM tools available in the market today. As a result, most of Binary Defense’s customers aren’t currently using SIEM, according to Valentine. Adding SIEM features will allow Binary Defense to expand from the SMB to the midmarket and fulfill the supply chain requirements of larger customers.
ConnectMeVoice Hosted VoIP
VoIP and UC specialist ConnectMeVoice has been in business for more than 25 years but recently realized that the best way to go to the market was through the channel. Now, the company is working side by side with MSPs, agents and solution providers to bring its ConnectMeVoice Hosted its ConnectMeVoice Hosted VoIP offering to business customers. ConnectMeVoice Hosted VoIP gives customers access to cloud-based communications and mobility features at a fraction of the cost. In fact, its pricing is one of its big differentiators for customers, as well as its high margins for partners, according to the company. Solution providers are able to private-label and customize the hosted PBX solution to meet the needs of their end customers.
Crewhu
Crewhu’s employee recognition and customer satisfaction platform is aimed at helping MSPs improve their customer service capabilities. The Crewhu platform integrates with many of the top MSP professional services automation, documentation and VoIP platforms and measures several factors that keep teams motivated, said CEO Stephen Spiegel.
Ryan Denning, Crewhu’s vice president of sales, said the right recognition helps teams work together and work with customers better.
“When you can publicly recognize people on a daily basis, they will engage more,” he said. “And that makes it more profi table for the business as a whole.”
Crewhu integrates with platforms from ConnectWise, Autotask, Kaseya, IT Glue, Microsoft Teams and BrightGauge.
CrushBank Resolve
CrushBank Resolve is an automated AI layer for ConnectWise Manage designed for the service port. When an IT expert clicks on a ticket, the AI layer automatically reads the ticket and performs a search.
“In a split second it comes back with all the tickets and all the confi gs,” said Brian Mullaney, Crushbank’s chief revenue offi cer.
“It would pull back from ConnectWise, from IT Glue, from SharePoint, from any number of systems that you run. Most of the data you have is unsearchable, and we bring it back in a moment’s notice,” Mullaney said.
When a user clicks on a ticket in the service board, CrushBank Resolve automatically throws a query string back to IBM’s Watson and then returns the most relevant tickets, confi gurations and documents.
Dynabook Satellite Pro L50
Dynabook Americas, formerly Toshiba America Client Solutions, has revived Toshiba’s former Satellite Pro laptop series with new SMB-focused models including the Satellite Pro L50. The notebook features a 15.6-inch FHD display, a 10th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, discrete Nvidia GeForce MX250 graphics, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage.
Other features include an HD webcam, dual-array microphones and a wide selection of ports (including USB-A, USB-C, HDMI and Ethernet). On portability, the Satellite Pro L50 weighs 4.07 pounds and measures 0.74 of an inch thick. In addition, Dynabook introduced two other new models in the series—the 14-inch Satellite Pro C40 and the 15.6inch Satellite Pro C50.
CyberPower Systems PowerPanel Cloud App
CyberPower Systems’ PowerPanel Cloud app enables remote monitoring of the company’s UPS system from anywhere.
Designed for iOS and Android mobile devices as well as desktop applications, CyberPower’s new cloud application simplifi es power monitoring of one or more CyberPower UPS systems to help reduce IT resources and gain operating effi ciencies.
With the PowerPanel Cloud app, UPS systems are monitored from a colorized dashboard that provides monitoring of each unit’s status, including instant problem recognition and power conditions. The application targets the SMB market, including retailers and restaurants that rely on digital cash registers and other point-of-sale systems.
Eaton 9PX UPS
Eaton recently launched its new 9PX lithium-ion UPS. The new UPS provides longer battery life and a smaller footprint than valve-regulated leadacid battery-powered UPS technology, targeting distributed and edge environments as well as industrial applications ranging from health care to education. Eaton’s new 9PX lithium-ion UPS offers seamless integration for virtualmachine-centric management and disaster preparedness in the event of outages. It has a life expectancy of eight to 10 years with increased reliability and a smaller footprint compared with VRLA-powered UPSes. The company said the new lithium-ion battery innovation for its UPSes provides longer battery life to enable customers to “set it and forget it” and requires little on-site support from IT staff, data center professionals and maintenance personnel.
Dell Technologies PowerEdge XE8545
Dell’s PowerEdge XE server line is purpose-built for complex, emerging workloads that require high performance and large storage, which is why NVMe is critical. The servers deliver the reliability and security for demanding applications inside traditional data centers or in extreme conditions stretching from outside the data center to the harsh edge environment of the IT infrastructure.
Dell’s PowerEdge XE8545 server combines the maximum core counts of two third-generation AMD EPYC processors with four of the highestperforming Nvidia A100 GPUs.
Dell said it has increased the speed of storage with NVMe and reduced data latency with PCIe to accelerate I/O throughput, which prevents performance bottlenecks.
Egnyte Platform
Egnyte, which develops a unifi ed platform to help manage, secure and govern businesses’ data across any cloud or any device from anywhere, is getting ready to launch an offering aimed at the architecture, engineering and construction market.
Eric Anthony, director of MSP community and engagement, said users in that market need specialized solutions to solve unique issues related to large file sizes and the amount of remote collaboration.
“There are a lot of problems shifting the large architecture, engineering and construction fi les,” Anthony told CRN. “Traditional email attachments don’t work. And employees often collaborate on those fi les from remote trailers, so it’s hard to connect.”
Security is also an issue, Anthony said. “If building plans are compromised, a company is open to breaches,” he said.
Evo Security Privileged Access And Password Management
Evo Security plans to debut a password manager and release an updated version of its privileged access management offering in the fourth quarter, according to CEO Michael Roth.
As the attack surface accelerates toward MSPs and their SMB customers, SMBs need to adopt a similar mentality as their enterprise brethren and fi nd a way to look at disparate parts of their IT infrastructure. Evo Security overhauled its elevated access tool to address the needs of key channel stakeholders.
In 2022, Roth said Evo Security plans to focus on enriching the collection of information that’s been aggregated into a company’s technology to help it take proactive and pre-emptive action.
Lexmark Cloud Bridge
Lexmark is seeking to create new opportunities for partners with its growing suite of cloud services, including cloud print management and cloud fl eet management. And the company’s cloud services were recently expanded to cover printer hardware from all manufacturers, not just Lexmark, with Lexmark Cloud Bridge.
Lexmark Cloud Bridge aims “to open up a whole new world for our partner community,” enabling partners to connect multibranded devices to the Lexmark cloud services suite, said Greg Chavers, vice president for North America channel sales. “The Cloud Bridge suite gives partners the opportunity to connect these devices into the cloud services— where before, they were limited to just Lexmark-branded devices,” Chavers said. “Now you can connect all brands to Lexmark cloud services so that you can execute with Cloud Print Management and with Cloud Fleet Management.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Alletra
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Alletra is a portfolio of cloud-native data infrastructure offerings for managing a business’ data. At its core is a new Data Services Cloud Console that helps shift the data infrastructure from the edge to the cloud to give customers a way to access and utilize data in an on-demand and as-a-service fashion. HPE Alletra aims to simplify data management by abstracting the data infrastructure control plane from the data plane and moving it to the cloud. This provides a single, consistent operational experience that allows automatic discovery and confi guration of any newly connected system, an AI-based approach to automating storage provisioning based on intent, and the ability to manage the data infrastructure from anywhere.
Liongard Essentials
Liongard in May unveiled Liongard Essentials, a streamlined version of its core platform for automating and scaling MSPs’ businesses. Liongard Essentials targets MSPs looking to better manage their lower-tier managed services customers with a focus on Microsoft 365 license management, domain and TLS/SSL monitoring. Liongard Essentials helps MSPs standardize processes and their technicians’ tool stack as a way to help reduce management time and increase effi ciency. Liongard Essentials includes five Inspectors: Microsoft 365, Internet Domain, TLS/SSL, Identity Monitoring and Google Workspace. MSPs can have up to 10 of these Inspectors active per customer environment. All of the other capabilities of Liongard’s core platform are included as well.
Intel Xeon E-2300
Intel has adapted its Rocket Lake desktop CPU architecture for a new line of Xeon E processors that are designed for entry-level servers in the small-business and cloud services segments.
The company said the 10 Xeon E-2300 CPUs for single-socket servers provide up to a 17 percent improvement in performance over the Xeon E-2200 processors that were made generally available in 2019. The processors are being supported by Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Supermicro and other server vendors.
The processors are available in four-, six- and eight-core confi gurations with thermal design power ranging from 65 to 95 watts. They support base clock speeds of up to 3.7GHz and turbo boost speeds of up to 5.1GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0.
Park Place Technologies’ version 19 of its Entuity Software now offers new physical storage and server monitoring, OS monitoring of Windows and Linux servers, and new discovery capabilities and features for asset management. Entuity Software version 19 gives businesses a single source for customerdiscovered and customer-managed assets, and provides detailed reporting and an at-a-glance view of what is in the network. As new assets are discovered, those assets will be fl agged to let users quickly evaluate them. That single view will let users manage or unmanage assets all from a single location. Entuity Software version 19 can also discover server infrastructure and storage assets and list them directly from its builtin confi guration management database.
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Sesame By ITRenew Overcomes Infrastructure Cost, Supply-Chain And Sustainability Barriers
Q. What are the unique advantages hyperscale cloud service providers have when it comes to meeting new data center compute, storage and networking demands?
A. The scale of the world’s largest data center operators enables them to define their own supply chains and systems. They’ve designed IT hardware architectures from the ground up that deliver best-in-class performance, compute density, power and cooling efficiency. And they’ve optimized their supply chains to achieve the lowest possible total cost. Now, for the first time, ITRenew is making those advantages available to the broader market. Our circular economic approach puts that same hyperscale-grade infrastructure, performance and efficiency in the hands of data center operators everywhere, at 50 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than conventional OEM gear. Sesame by ITRenew compute, storage and networking solutions are optimized for critical workloads like Kubernetes, AI/ML and edge, and configured to suit any environment or deployment. Plus, modular, open architecture design makes it easy to add capacity as workloads and business needs evolve.
Q. What’s the consequence of the massively supply constrained global environment that exists today for customers’ ability to scale?
A. While the biggest industry players can still get anything they need, the rest of the world is seeing extraordinarily long lead times on everything from bicycles and cars to servers. What’s different about Sesame by ITRenew is that we’re not beholden to traditional supply chains. Our circular economic approach means that all the material needed to build new IT infrastructure is already manufactured and in our possession. We’ve eliminated long order cycles and can deliver fully integrated, tested and assembled rack-scale systems, ready to plug-and-play in as little as four weeks.
Q. With the persistent drum beat of negative climate news, everyone is talking about zero carbon goals. How should partners think about sustainability relative to IT equipment?
A. Obviously, a focus on renewable energy and run-time operations is great, but neither are a task for the channel. Where partners can do their part—and have a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves—is by looking toward delivering recertified and circular economic solutions that have the potential to avoid up to 75 percent of the CO2e impact of IT equipment that comes from manufacturing. With sustainably sourced IT equipment, there’s zero compromise on performance or quality. In fact, it actually out-delivers in both regards, while also having massive positive global impact on reducing CO2 and e-waste.
Sesame by ITRenew compute and storage solutions: Sustainable scale made practical. Get started today. ITRenew.com/become-a-reseller
Ali Fenn
President
”Cost, supply chain and sustainability imperatives are very real. Sesame by ITRenew’s unique approach helps you solve for all three while you scale your essential
”infrastructure.
Pure Storage Portworx Enterprise 2.8
Pure Storage’s Portworx Enterprise 2.8 provides the same cloud-like experience for Kubernetes applications whether they reside on Pure Storage’s FlashArray or FlashBlade storage infrastructures or in the cloud, said Michael Ferranti, senior director of product marketing for its cloud-native business unit.
Pure Storage is also enhancing its Portworx Essentials free versions, allowing customers to manage containers across an unlimited number of nodes with unlimited capacity, he said.
In addition, Portworx now provides container-native storage on VMware Tanzu and any container storage interface-compatible storage system to provide container-granular data management including backup and recovery, encryption, and data migration over VMware or cloud block storage.
Scale Computing HE150
Scale Computing’s HE150 appliance combines Scale Computing’s self-healing platform for autonomously running applications at the edge with a small, allfl ash, NVMe storage-based compute appliance that delivers simplicity, effi ciency and enterprise-ready virtualization.
The product provides a fully functional, integrated platform for running applications including high-availability clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.
Robbie Wittman, regional sales manager for Scale Computing, said restaurants, coffee shops and grocery store chains that have data being created at the edge will benefi t.
“With our system, if the hardware itself fails, everything automatically replicates to the remaining two nodes, and everyone’s up and running,” he said.
Rackmount.IT Rack Mount Kits
With vendor rack mounts sometimes amounting to simple ear brackets that leave ports in the back and power supplies dangling, Rackmount.IT offers a kit that aims to solve some of the headaches of desktop fi rewalls.
Rackmount.IT offers rack mount kits to bring network interfaces to the front, a fi xed power supply to decrease the chance of outages and custom air fl ow cutouts to avoid overheating, according to the company.
The company’s industrial rack mount kits add shielded cables and shielded CAT6 couplers to protect against high frequencies.
Installation takes five minutes, according to the company, and Rackmount.IT offers custom designs and colors. Supported brands include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks.
Schneider Electric APC Smart-UPS Ultra
Schneider Electric’s new APC SmartUPS Ultra is 50 percent smaller and lighter than the company’s traditional UPS, meaning there’s more rack space inside edge environments for networking gear.
Smart-UPS Ultra also has three times the battery life of its traditional VRLA batteries thanks to lithium-ion innovation, has two times faster recharge power, and provides mounting options including rack, tower or wall/ceiling mounts to be installed anywhere.
The new UPS utilizes Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure remote monitoring, management and servicing offering, which channel partners can leverage. Schneider Electric’s cloudbased software delivers data-driven results to optimize performance and enables wherever-you-go visibility across multiple UPS devices.
Red Sift Lookalike Domain Services
Red Sift plans to launch services for brand protection and lookalike (or cousin) domains later this year to build upon the defense against fraudulent attacks it already provides to domains owned by customers, said Senior Vice President of Strategy Chuck Swenberg.
Adversaries are trying to impersonate legitimate domains by—for instance—replacing a “1” with an “l” in the domain name, Swenberg said. In response, Red Sift plans to apply a tremendous amount of automated capacity to scanning domains for minor typographical changes as well as aggressively report to authorities any lookalike domains spotted in hopes of getting them taken down, he said.
ScopeStack
ScopeStack’s platform helps MSPs automate the scoping, pricing and level of effort required when preparing to offer services to customers.
ScopeStack founder and CEO Jon Scott said MSPs have traditionally depended on Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to scope out services, which is very much a manual process.
“Our web-based platform sits between an MSP’s CRM or project management tools to automate the process,” Scott said.
“[This automation] is something MSPs are really looking for,” said Roy Harmon, ScopeStack’s head of marketing.
ScopeStack integrates with ConnectWise Manage and Microsoft Dynamics and in the near future will also be integrated with Autotask, Kaseya and several distributor platforms, Scott said. ■
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Q. With a large portion of data not being used, how can businesses get the most out of their data?
A. Data is a treasure trove of value that businesses don’t always know what to do with. The 2020 Rethink Data report noted that only 32 percent of data available to enterprises is used. How can businesses get more value out of their data? Tackle the barriers that impede this value—unpredictable cloud economics, growing TCOs associated with data storage and movement, the siloing of data, ignorance regarding how to move and optimize massive unstructured data sets and a lack of a unified data strategy. These are opportunities for our partners to guide business leaders to get more out of their data.
Q. How does data agility factor into this process?
A. Hugely. The modern data landscape is marked by unprecedented data growth, with 179ZB of data volume expected by 2025, and with enterprise data growing at the rate of 42 percent this year alone. The data is more sprawled than ever—from endpoints to edge to on-prem data centers and the multicloud core. The current shifts in data gravity usher extraordinary amounts of data in two directions—toward the edge and toward the multicloud core. This means not only that data resides at these two locations, but that the movement of data streams between them needs support. Helping a business overcome the cost and complexity challenges of data sprawl can position a VAR or MSP for success.
Q. How does Seagate lower TCO to ensure businesses maximize and monetize their data usage, while increasing value?
A. Businesses managing massive data sets (100TB and higher) find that the bandwidth is often insufficient for quick transfers. For them, we built Lyve Mobile, a mass-capacity mobile edge storage and data transfer service using frictionless, rugged data shuttles that quickly move heaps of data. Companies that reach scale find themselves facing unpredictable bills and fees (API, egress, etc.) for moving data sets in and out of the public cloud. As a complement of their cloud strategy, we created Lyve Cloud, a TCO-optimizing data storage-as-aservice platform situated close to where data is located (at the edge). It’s simple and efficient, with zero unpredictable fees. Finally, for enterprises that want to scale their private data centers with industry-leading density, Seagate recommends storage systems powered by our industry-leading enterprise-class hard drives and SSDs. The self-healing, high density CORVAULT and other data storage systems are built on trust, affordability and ease of use.
Jeff Fochtman
Senior Vice President, Business and Marketing
”The leading companies of tomorrow need to overcome the cost and complexity challenges that come with data sprawl today.”
Learn how to get more value out of data in Seagate’s Mass Data on the Go report.
