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In the ever wider offering of Storage products, HP is certainly one of the most interesting players and its 3PAR StoreServ line offer a complete and advanced solution that allows to even realise an all-flash architecture.

In the SMB scene HP is however very consolidated with a range of products cheaper but not even less flexible, nonetheless. We are talking about the solutions called MSA which have reached the 4th generation, and, at the moment we are writing, are composed of 2 models: the cheaper MSA 1040 and the MSA 2040.

F5 Networks has a modern platform that unfortunately isn’t widely known; we have talked with Paul Pindell, Senior Solution Architect at VMworld 2015.

Let’s start with the offer of F5 Networks and try to better understand what you do

F5 Networks offer a full proxy architecture that allows to analyze all the traffic that enters and goes out the business walls and its branches. Traffic gets analyzed and decrypted even if chypred standards, like SSL, are used. Out technologies then operate on the whole traffic to perform several functions such as firewall, routing, security management on the application level, acceleration and compression and even a Web content control. The strength of F5 is in the intelligence that allows to manage this architecture.

During VMworld we ad the chance of meeting Jason Bandouveres, Director and Product Management for Fortinet’s virtualized solutions.

What do you think about the presence of Fortinet here at WMworld and the position of your company with regards to the evolutions of the threats for security?

Fortinet is a company with 15 years of experience in the network and system protection field, and it’s ready to face all the novelties that the Software Defined systems are bringing. Fortigate, out most known and used product, is one of the most complete UTM (Unified Threat Management) and has some fundamental features, like an Operative System that has been developed internally and profoundly optimized (FortiOS), an internally developed antivirus engine and a system dedicated to the protection against 0-day threats.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Albert Kramer, Technical Manager Continental Europe Trend Micro, at WMworld; we talked about security.

How does Trend Micro face the small and medium businesses market that is so widespread in Italy?
Trend Micro offers different product for private users and companies, in particular we have two solutions for the protection of small-medium companies and another for the bigger ones, so that we can offer a specific product for every kind of client.

The small and medium companies solution can be directly managed by Trend Micro for the companies that haven’t got an IT staff, or it can be managed by an internal/external IT if present.
The more advanced version of the Worry-Free Business Security suite that we offer on the SMB market can handle servers, virtual machines, mobile devices and mail servers without any particular difficulty on a technical aspect.

That naturally doesn’t mean to exclude the bigger companies…

No, we have indeed a 360° product line for every needs.
In addition to a dedicated suite for the Enterprise tier companies, we support the integration with VMware NSX and we even offer dedicated solutions for datacenters and cloud infrastructures.

And how do you relate with respect to Managed Service Providers and resellers?
We have a program of actions and products dedicated to this category of users with specific solutions for MSPs, hosted security systems for, say, email security and management dashboards with SSO features.

A really complete offering even for a category so heterogeneous and hard to fulfill.