Citrix Systems Inc. last month pushed into the access infrastructure market with a new suite of products designed to consolidate identity management, application conferencing and network services into an integrated offering. The company plans to roll out its Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite in several product introductions throughout the year. The first offering, the MetaFrame Secure Access Manager, provides secure, single-point access over the Internet to internal and external corporate applications, data sources, documents and Web content, Citrix officials said. Building on Citrix’s existing NFuse Elite portal offering, the MetaFrame Secure Access Manager enhances the product’s security via SSL integration. The resulting offering enables encrypted access over the Internet without the need for a VPN, officials said.
EMC’s arrays
EMC Corp. in March announced a bridging technology that lets its newest midrange storage arrays use lower-cost disk drives. The move is aimed at allowing IT managers to switch from tape-based data archiving to long-term disk storage. EMC said its Clariion CX400 and CX600 arrays, which are resold by Dell Computer Corp., can be retrofitted with advanced technology attachment (ATA) disk drives alongside or in place of the Fibre Channel drives now used. Arrays with ATA drives for so-called near-line storage will be priced up to 50 per cent below the cost of an all-Fibre Channel configuration, said EMC.
Intel interfaces
Intel Corp. last month released network interface card products aimed at helping servers and client PCs handle torrents of Ethernet traffic on corporate LANs. New gigabit and 10G Ethernet adapters could help corporate customers take advantage of high-speed LAN connections and newer, powerful server processor technology applications to run faster between clients and servers. Intel is releasing its 10G Ethernet PCI-X server adapter, which can be used to connect a PCI-X-based server with links as fast as 10Gbps. It also announced a four-port gigabit Ethernet NIC for servers, and new gigabit Ethernet chips aimed at making blade servers run faster.