Announcements

New Products, New Services, and Critical Alerts Announcements

SonicWall Returns to Independance

Dell Sells SonicWALL to Independent Investors

After only 4 years of ownership, Dell sells SonicWall to independent investors, making SonicWall an independent company again.

In 2012, Dell acquired SonicWall to add to their profolio of security products, but in late 2016 chose to sell their software division (which SonicWall was considered a part of, along with Quest Software) to support their acquisition of EMC Corporation, a large enterprise storage vendor.

As of this writing, SonicWall is already moving forward with the separation, with a new logo and a newly announced partner program, due later this year, called the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program.

After all the disappointment from partners after the Dell acquisition, with Dell making promises not to compete with partners or make changes to the partner programs (all of which happened), partners are looking forward to working directly with SonicWall again.

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Western Networks Becomes Altaro Partner

The Best-In-Breed Backup Solution Is Now Available From Western Networks

Western Networks partners with Altaro to provide best-in-breed backup solutions for both stand-alone VMs and servers (Altaro BackupFS) and virtual VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructures (Altaro VMBackup).

After extensive research of various backup solutions, Altaro came out on top with the features our customers need, along with the simplicity of deployment and day-to-day management - all at an amazing price compared to the competition.

Altaro BackupFS is an application that backs up files on a stand-alone server, whether virtual of physical. Backups use infinite deltas, allowing for continuously rolling over backups that keep only the changed parts of the files during each backup, drastically reducing the amount of storage required for the backups. This allows for either smaller backup storage targets, or backups that go back farther in time. Altaro's reverse delta technology provides for easy access to the most recent backup with a simple drag and drop from the backup drive (older backups are accessed via the Altaro interface so that the required version of the file can be assembled from the deltas on demand).

Altaro VMBackup protects an entire virtual infrastructor from the hypervisor side, whether VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V, ensuring complete backups of the entire virtual machine. The backups take advantage of infinite delta technology, which backs up only the changes since the last backup, increasing backup storage efficiency and backup performance. Restores can be an entire virtual machine, or individual files. Altaro VMBackup is Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server aware, ensuring clean backups of the databases and truncation of the database logs. With Exchange restores, whole databases or individual mailbox items can be restored.

On top of all of the above, Altaro's support has been outstanding, resulting in quick and competent answers, which really helps Western Networks maintain a high level of support to their clients, should a problem arise that needs Altaro's technicians involved.

Going forward, Altaro's solutions will be Western Networks' go to answer for backup.

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SonicWALL Virtual Appliances

SonicWALL Offers Email Security and ViewPoint / GMS Virtual Appliances

In addition to hardware appliances and Windows software installations, SonicWALL now offers virtual appliances for both Email Security and ViewPoint / GMS that can easily be used in VMWare ESX and ESXi environments. This allows SonicWALL and administrators to take advantage of greater performance, better utilization of the server hardware, lower power requirements, reduced physical server space, and hardware fail-over and / or fault tolerance offered by the VMWare's ESX and ESXi hypervisors.

In addition, for those who would previously have deployed software versions of these products, there is no longer any need to purchase a Windows license for the SonicWALL product to run on top of - the virtual appliance is entirely self-contained, running on top of SonicWALL's hardened SonicLinux OS. An added side benefit is that the virtual appliances use far fewer server resources than the Windows based product, further enhancing the benefit of the virtual appliances.

SonicWALL's Email Security virtual appliance can be deployed as a stand-alone virtual machine on a single physical server (along side other virtual machines on the same physical server), or as an Email Security cluster in split-config mode on a single physical server or distributed across multiple physical servers for redundancy and load balancing.

With VMWare's ESXi hypervisor being offered for free by VMWare, there is no real excuse not to use the SonicWALL virtual appliances, especially for small businesses that often have servers that have plenty of extra horsepower to handle their existing server's role as well as the SonicWALL virtual appliance role at the same time (VMWare ESXi running two virtual machines; one the office Windows Server, the other SonicWALL's Email Security or ViewPoint - or all three - all on one physical server). That saves space, power, administrative burden, and most of all - money.

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