Enterprise Monitoring and Blocking

We were going to include Sequel Net Access Manager (SNAM) from Sequel Technologies in this review, but the immanent release of a significantly upgraded, rearchitected and renamed release made inclusion inappropriate.

The existing SNAM version 3.0, and its new incarnation, Sequel Internet Resource Manager 3.5 (SIRM), are aimed at the top end of the monitoring and blocking market. Indeed, Sequel's product vision defines a new market segment: Enterprise IP resource management. Currently, this new category includes only a few other vendors, such as Tally Systems with its Veranda product and Elron Electronic Industries with its Internet Manager.

Sequel says it will have specific support for the CA Unicenter Framework. Sequel also plans SNMP support for integration with other enterprise management suites.

SIRM works with all of the major protocols including the Web (HTTP), newsgroups (Network News Transfer Protocol), e-mail (POP3, SMTP, and IMAP4), FTP, Telnet, and TN3270. Its product architecture is an add-in filter for Microsoft's or Netscape's proxy server, and it also offers the Sequel Proxy, which is designed to cascade to any other standard proxy server. Other components are the IP Gateway service, which provides an IP packet filter, and the IP Monitor, a packet analyzer-type segment monitor.

User data is supplied by a Directory Synchronization Service, which provides information from Microsoft NT domains, Novell Directory Services, and directories access by the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. The Naming Service identifies users by network login name instead of host name and/or IP address.

You can manage intranet traffic from Oracle SQL*net and Lotus Notes; and SIRM can limit access to a particular protocol based on the time of day and usage quotas. Behind all of this is industrial-strength reporting and alerting services.