News

Vendors Release App Fabric, Compliance and Automation Upgrades

• By Kathleen Ohlson
• October 20, 2005

ORLANDO—Appistry, Axentis and Opsware are some of the vendors that took advantage of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to introduce new product upgrades.

Appistry added fabric accessible memory to its Enterprise Application Fabric software. A fabric—defined by Appistry—is an application execution environment designed to free apps from the constraints of traditional infrastructure-centric IT.

The fabric accessible memory is a virtual, in-memory area for storing dynamic application data. FAM is built on top of the application fabric. Every piece of data stored to FAM is located in the memory on multiple computers.

The Enterprise Application Fabric 3.0 comes with a new framework that allows developers to define events and propagate them across the application fabric. Events and FAM can work together to form a bus that allows services or application fabric tasks to communicate within the fabric.

EAF 3.0 now supports Novell SuSE Linux 9. It already supports Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 platforms.

The company says it will be available for preview in November and generally available in the first quarter of 2006.

Axentis introduced a version of Axentis Enterprise, which is a governance, risk and compliance management product. It features a dashboard within its risk and control management function that enables users to drill down into data records, annotations and documents.

Axentis added reporting enhancements to its software’s incident management and policy, training and certification functions. These enhancements were made to ensure early detection and prevention, the company says. They also improve performance across regulations and processes such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and corporate integrity agreements.

Data center automation software developer Opsware announced version 4.5 of its Network Automation System. The software provides an automated infrastructure for companies to manage service-based IT models such as SOA and utility computing.

New capabilities include intelligent auto-discovery, policy prioritization and risk assessment. Intelligent auto-discovery identifies devices with multiple interfaces and then chooses the primary management IP for each device. NAS 4.5 now automatically prioritizes violations based on a policy’s risk rating. It automatically remediates critical violations to bring devices back into compliance.

The new version also features a new Web Services API and JMS Connector for enhancing integration.