Now that Microsoft's network access protection has arrived, a startup is trying to make a business out of simplifying NAP setup for SMBs.

Napera made its first public appearance last week at RSA Conference 2008 with demonstrations of its two NAP appliances.

The value they tout to customers is that if they have either Microsoft Vista or XP with Service Pack 3 on their client machines, they can set up NAP protection in an hour or so, depending on the size of the network. They don’t even have to have Windows Server 2008 to provide policies.

Napera licensed NAP software from Microsoft and has it installed on their appliances which include 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switches. So client machines plug into to switch ports and the switch checks their security posture against policies and then enforces whatever access rights they are entitled to.

The devices can be stacked to support up to 192 ports in one logical system.

Napera also sells a reporting, logging and management service that customers connect to over the Internet. The Napera devices periodically upload logs to the Napera data center where customers can access them, generate reports and manage the devices.

The company says its gear is minimally disruptive to existing customer networks if they can get past installing new access switches. Beyond that, they don’t have to add servers even for management. They could employ Windows Server 2008 and its NAP capabilities, but that’s not necessary.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.