InfoCenter on IBM eServer®BladeCenter™
Best-of-breed security solutions have long been the most effective choices for securing the enterprise. However, that approach has resulted in the deployment of a disparate set of products for firewall, intrusion detection, antivirus, vulnerability analysis and other network-centric security functions. This has led to gaps in protection and a high cost of ownership because of the need for multiple management consoles and a lack of integration.
Some of the challenges with dedicated security appliance solutions include updating the software and the cost of maintaining additional boxes on the network. Blade server products address many of the drawbacks of appliances and rack-optimized servers. The increasing number of security appliances, ranging from dedicated firewalls, VPNs, intrusion detection systems (IDS), SSL accelerators, gateway antivirus solutions and load balancers make the blades desirable for mid-market, enterprise and Telco use. Consolidating the solutions to a single network element dramatically reduces the management task (managing one box, as opposed to five); provides load balancing and failover support in a single solution, further reducing the number of solutions to be purchased; and improves performance.
In response to the above challenges, IBM with its leadership blade server platform IBM eServer® BladeCenter™ in partnership with BladeFusion Technologies Ltd. and best of breed security software vendors (Check Point, ISS, Symantec, OpenService, Trend Micro, Websense, Finjan and others) have jointly created an integrated security platform architecture for enterprise and mid-market customers: System Solutions for Information Security. This architecture is based on BladeCenter™, an open, high performance, highly available and scalable platform with potentially much lower cost and better cost/performance ratio compared to the representative competitive vendors.
InfoCenter is certified with BladeFusion's OETM Operating Environment and optimized on IBM eServer® BladeCenter™. This combination provides a superior blade computing platform for server consolidation, performance and a more manageable environment to achieve efficiencies of operation. InfoCenter builds on the benefits of BladeCenter™ to provide a cost-effective, highly reliable and modular security and compliance management platform.
InfoCenter, running on IBM eServer® BladeCenter™, can yield significantly better protection from already deployed security systems with a demonstrable ROI.