Database security specialist Secerno has released a new version of its SQL protection software, putting the accent, the company claims, on better management and improved performance.

After the major release of 3.0 in May, Secerno SQL 3.1's upgrades are more incremental, but feature an enterprise controller appliance designed to help address one of the criticisms of 'point' security software such as Secerno, namely that it doesn't scale well. A single console now aggregates reports and alerting across large organizations using it to protect a range of databases.

The software widens support to include Sybase for the first time, while throughput has now been optimized for in excess of a theoretical 210,000 transactions per second (TPS), way in advance of where most customers would considering using such a system.

The improved management also delivers benefits in terms of reporting for compliance purposes. Secerno claims the software can now complete complex reporting functions in a matter of seconds using the 'push-button' feature.

There are a number of obvious directions for the software to go in. "We've delivered on our promises and will continue to deliver on our promises; for example with support for blade servers coming in 2009," promised Secerno CEO Steve Hurn. The company is also working on IBM DB2 support though no timescale has been announced for this.

In July, Secerno added an important element to its security mix by porting the system to run on VMware, now said to account for much of its sales growth.

Secerno 3.1 is available now, in appliance form or virtualized for VMware, at a cost of £18,000 or $36,000.