Extreme Networks this week unveiled two security offerings designed to allow customers improved insight and control over their networks.

Extreme released an upgrade to its Network Admission Control (NAC) portfolio and a new policy-management application that enables network administrators to better manage large networks, the company says.

NAC and secure switching are becoming table stakes in the LAN-switch industry. All of Extreme’s major competitors – Cisco, HP ProCurve, Foundry, Enterasys and 3Com – either have varying scopes of NAC initiatives or market themselves as vendors of secure switches or networks.

Extreme’s latest offering is Sentriant Access Guard (AG) 5.0. The NAC software supports large networks and numerous end points with features that centralize management of multiserver deployments, Extreme says.

Sentriant AG employs a single dedicated management server that controls multiple enforcement servers distributed across buildings or departments. For smaller NAC deployments, a single management server can be deployed that provides embedded enforcement capabilities on one platform, the company says.

For improved scalability and reliability, Sentriant AG now supports load balancing capabilities, where the endpoint-testing load is distributed across all enforcement servers in a cluster. This adds redundancy, so should one server fail, the security policy remains functional, Extreme says.

An enhanced user interface is designed to provide enterprise-scale administration capabilities, where managers can access, view and control all servers and endpoint access information from a single management console. A new multiuser, role-based administration feature allows numerous individuals throughout an organization, each with varying responsibilities and access permissions, to access, manage or view Sentriant AG information, the company says.

Early this year, Extreme updated its ExtremeXOS operating-system software with a feature that stops malicious users from configuring a PC or laptop with a static IP address to circumvent NAC security.

The new Extreme Policy Manager (EPM) tool is client-based software designed to create security policies and rules, and ease management of access-control lists (ACLs). EPM supports Extreme’s BlackDiamond and Summit switches.