thePipeline

Switched on

Alcatel officials added several products to the company's OmniSwitch 6000 enterprise workgroup product family. New offerings include the Alcatel OmniSwitch 6602 layer-3 workgroup switch and the Alcatel OmniSwitch 6600 U24 fiber-to-the-desk switch. The OmniSwitch 6600 family now has power-over-Ethernet capability.

The OmniSwitch 6602 is available in 24- and 48-port 10/100 models, with a lifetime warranty and built-in stacking and gigabit ports. The 6600 U24 fiber-to-the-desk solution is designed for military and campus networks. In a military setting, security demands call for fiber cabling. On campuses, workstations can be too far-flung for copper cabling to be practical.

The latter product "was driven by military customers who want fiber all the way to the desk," said Brian Witt, director of product marketing at Alcatel. "It's also useful where you have cable runs [that are] longer than copper can run."

The switches are stackable, making them a good fit for rackmounted network settings, Witt said.

Taking BPM to the enterprise

Drawing on the expertise of partner company Cognos Inc., officials at enterprise resource planning provider Deltek Systems Inc. have launched a business performance management (BPM) solution for the enterprise-level market.

The offerings focus on measuring and analyzing major performance indicators to provide guidance on how to align strategies with daily operations, said Rick Lowrey, executive vice president of Deltek.

The BPM suite includes budgeting, score carding, reporting, planning and analytical tools. Much of Deltek's marketing efforts target commercial customers, but the suite also could be of use to agencies, Lowrey said.

"All agencies have key business drivers," he said. "There are relevancies to that. The contracting officers need to be able to connect what they're doing with the larger goals of their procurement."

Parts is parts

Supermicro Computer Inc. officials have released three new single-processor server boards based on Intel Corp.'s E7221 chipset, the latest iteration of Pentium 4.

The processor chip can run at a zippy 3.6 GHz, and Supermicro technologists have designed each of the three boards with a different set of features to meet customer needs. The Super P8SCT and P8SC8 can support tower and rackmounted servers, while the Super P8SCi is for towers.

All three of the server boards feature DDR2-533/400 unbuffered error-correcting code memory and a built-in controller to support up to four Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives.

Network as a security device

AT&T officials plan to add protection against network-based worm and virus attacks in Internet Protect managed security services. They will include the new capabilities early next year in AT&T's network-based firewalls, which reside across the company's IP-based backbone network, said Stan Quintana, vice president of AT&T's managed security services. This will eliminate the need for company officials to deploy firewalls at each customer location.

The latest announcement advances AT&T officials' strategy to turn the network into a security device, Quintana said.