Vendor says its technology offers management, security and compliance capabilities for virtual environments.
Reflex Systems evolves its security products into tools for the virtual realm, and the vendor again updates the technology to incorporate policy-based management and compliance-related capabilities.
As companies expand their data centers, virtual systems management must become about more than curbing virtual machine sprawl.
The technology used to manage virtual servers can also be put to work securing the environment and ensuring compliance with internal policies and external regulatory requirements, according to Reflex Systems. The vendor, formerly Reflex Security, had made its name in the physical security market and changed its direction a few years back to address virtual security.
“Coming from the hardware-based IPS/IDS world just a few years ago, they’ve done a good job re-inventing themselves for the virtualization market,” says Phil Hochmuth, senior analyst at Yankee Group.
Reflex, recently flush with new venture capital funding, updated its virtual security tools with management smarts to enable its Virtual Management Center technology to apply policies across virtual servers, desktops and zones. VMC runs as a virtual machine and now includes a module that runs in the kernel of the hypervisor, dubbed vTrust, which works with VMware’s VSphere 4. Running inside the hypervisor enables vTrust to tag virtual machines and assign policies to follow the instance as it moves throughout an environment, Reflex explains.
“Dynamic policy management allows end users to write and apply policies to any attribute of a virtual machine and then tag the instance based on generic names to re-use the policies,” explains Pete Privateer, Reflex president and CEO. “The policies can be related to security, compliance or managing performance, and end users are able to use a structured query language, VQL, to search the environment and apply tags and policies to specific machines.”
Reflex competes with vendors such as Akorri, Altor Networks, Catbird and Vizioncore, but Privateer says its multiple features differentiate the vendor’s products from competitive offerings. Industry watchers say the vendor could compete more with VMware – with which Reflex is currently working to get VMsafe certified.
“They’re among a few vendors who have taken the next step in thinking about how to work in a virtualized environment: ask not what my product can do to improve virtualization (insert: security/management/visibility here), but what virtualization can do to improve how my product works,” Hochmuth adds.
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