SonicWall Releases Network Management System

Secure network infrastructure company SonicWall announced the release of its Global Management System (GMS) 6.0. The company's updates allow GMS administrators to define and push policies for Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and e-mail security appliances at the device, device group, or global level. Expanding granular management coverage to the CDP and email security product lines also helps enable, small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) to centrally manage their entire SonicWall infrastructure, the company said.

Other features include the ability to run custom reports for secure remote access devices, allowing administrators to use the raw logs collected from Aventail and SMB SSL VPN devices under management, application firewall reporting for providing greater visibility into the impact and effectiveness of application firewall policies and an upgraded Web services Application Programming Interface (API) facilitates integration between GMS and other management consoles and enterprise applications. GMS 6.0 also offers near real time live monitoring and alerting based on syslog messages from SonicWall devices under management.

Jan Sijp, SonicWall's director of product management, said with release 6.0 the company has greatly expanded the applicability of GMS to their customer's networks. Sijp said many customers have been asking SonicWall for central management for the company's Email Security and CDP appliances and now they have it at both the individual device and the group level.

"One of the main focus areas at SonicWall and for GMS in particular is serving our Managed Service Provider [MSP] customers. Our MSP customers will benefits from a new Web Services Application Programming Interface [API], which MSPs can use to integrate GMS with their other in-house systems," Sijp said. "GMS at its core is a productivity enhancement and expense management solution and GMS 6.0 builds on this foundation. Our new reverse inheritance feature closes the loop with the existing reverse inheritance functionality enabling customers to, among other things, copy configurations from one device to another or from one device to a group of devices."

GMS 6.0 is available both for general-purpose Windows servers and the SonicWall Universal Management Appliance (UMA) EM5000 appliance, and GMS customers can now create granular reports on who accessed what applications over what SSL VPN connection and at what time for forensic analysis and troubleshooting. GMS 6.0 also includes enhanced tools to assess hardware utilization for collection of syslog data and summarization for reporting. This feature also includes an estimation tool to determine total capacity of the hardware in use. The impact of a variety of parameters such as number of users and types of reports enabled is taken into consideration both at the global level and for each device under management.