BigFix tackles business continuity, virtualization

BigFix on Tuesday announced upgrades to its security and systems management platform that customers say help them more easily keep track of diverse, distributed endpoints.

BigFix Discovery 7 now includes policy management features that Mike Goodnow says will enable him to more easily manage groups of workstations with consistent rules. Goodnow, senior network engineer in the IT Services group at Capital Region Health Care (CRHC) in Concord, N.H., says the software which was originally purchased in 2003 to address patching, now serves as his "go-to tool" for information on endpoints and all the software running on them. Specifically, Goodnow, who has been using Discovery 7 for about three months, says creating policies with the updated release is straightforward and adding new policies to an existing set of policies, or baseline, is easier than before.

"In terms of making my life easier, that is a big one. I can right click on a fix or a patch and add the policies to the baselines and apply them to groups or whatever I want," Goodnow says.

BigFix also equipped Discovery 7 with high availability and business continuity features by allowing IT managers to distribute and install the server software component on many machines, any of which could carry the operational load of the entire environment and server as the central management console. The capability ensures, BigFix says, that if one server goes down, the entire environment doesn’t go down with it. The company also updated its distributed agent technology with support for VMware ESX Server hypervisor and zLinux (Linux on IBM System z) virtual environments. Goodnow says the capabilities helps him better track virtual machines.

"By having the virtual machine details, you can segregate them from physical machines and it's just good to be able to distinguish the virtual instances from boxes," he says.

Also with this release, BigFix incorporated bare metal provisioning for desktop, laptops and servers, which will help IT managers roll out standard operating system, application and other settings across machines consistently. BigFix, which competes with LANdesk, Microsoft, Symantec and others, says its suite offers a comprehensive set of applications designed to manage all aspects of endpoints from security, systems and now disaster recovery.

"We think people need to know all that they have in their environment and we keep extending on those capabilities," says Greg Toto, vice president of products and operations.

Annual subscription pricing for desktops and laptops ranges from $12 per endpoint for anti-threat (endpoint security bundle) to $15 per endpoint for power management, to $56 per endpoint for a comprehensive suite that covers all life-cycle security and systems management. The company says the product also includes server pricing, which is "higher," but did not disclose specific pricing details.