3Com Corp. announced in July a building-to-building wireless LAN compatible with any Wi-Fi certified access point which fits within a multi-vendor wireless infrastructure. Although bridging solutions are an established tool of any 802.11b wireless network, customers have found choices limited due to proprietary protocols. The new 3Com Wireless LAN Building-to-Building offers a cheaper alternative to laying cable and can quickly provide connections between temporary locations such as trailers in construction sites or temporary classrooms in educational settings, according to 3Com. It supports both 40-bit and 128-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy, and is transparent to virtual private network protocols, using a special encapsulation protocol to avoid conflicts with other tunnelling protocols. When used with 3Com’s SuperStack 3 Switch 4400, the bridge will identify and prioritize network traffic based on application, thus ensuring that business-critical traffic gets to its wireless destination in a specified time. In conjunction with 3Com Network Supervisor, managers can configure wireless devices and distribute software upgrades simultaneously to multiple wireless devices. The 3Com Wireless LAN Building-to-Building is expected to be available in Canada by early August at a cost of $1,485, not including antennas and cables.
JETNET Internetworking Services Inc. announced in July the release of SAM/SCA 2.0, a package that processes security threats to protect customers from cyberattacks. An enhanced version of its proactive managed security services platform, JETNET is automatically sent security events via the Security Activity Manager (SAM) Collection Agent (SCA), a data-collection and monitoring device developed by JETNET and installed on the end-user’s network. The SCA collects and stores data from selected security devices, which the correlation engine sorts, analyzes and correlates the data using hundreds of security filters. It sends only the necessary data and alerts to JETNET’s Internetworking Operations Centre (IOC). That’s where SAM, a JETNET-developed security operational support system, looks for suspicious patterns in the data, correlates and matches the symptoms with diagnostic criteria. When a threat is detected and an alert is generated, JETNET analysts immediately assess and respond by contacting the customer with information about the threat and provide recommendations on corrective action.