Tech Tip for June 2009

Most of us are trying to save some money these days. Did you know that can you purchase refurnished computers and equipment for up to half the cost of new equipment? You can also purchase maintenance contracts from 3 parties and also save money.

Dell has an outlet site, outlet.dell.com that you can purchase servers, desktop computers and laptop for a big discount. We purchase most of our equipment from that website.
Virbrant Technologies has refurbished equipment for HP, Dell, Cisco and various others. Most times the refreshed equipment is returns and is good as new. They are also typically guaranteed by a warranty.

Network hardware resell http://www.networkhardware.com/ offers both Cisco gear and Cisco smartnet contracts. You are able to save up to 80% on smartnet contracts. I had one of my clients move to this service and the results were great. They were able to receive parts in a timely fashion.

In this difficult economy, it pays to check out options like this to save money.

Fortinet 4.0 firmware Release

By the time that you read this article, will we have already held the Fortinet event discussing the 4.0 firmware release? The 4.0 release adding some additional functionally and features that make this release a worthwhile upgrade.

WAN Acceleration

The 4.0 release introduces WAN Acceleration to the Fortinet product line. (On certain Models only). WAN Acceleration can speed up file transfers between firewalls and also from firewall to vpn client. Microsoft CIFS is a protocol that performs poorly in a VPN or WAN (Wide Area Network) environment. I have completed some initial testing and it seems to improve performance by at least 20-30%. It also supports http, ftp and tcp. This feature can really help when you are deploying a remote office and need to add some speed without adding additional lines.
Identity based Policies

Identity based policies are also introduced in the 4.0 release. This feature allows you to identify users in a firewall policy and restrict access and also log access. This allows you to create granular policies and log in detail what users are doing. It is very flexible allowing you to specific access by time of day and other additional features. You can identity users based on Novell EDirectory, Windows Active Directory or LDAP.
Application Identification
This is another nice addition to the 4.0 release. With application identification, you can identify applications such as IM and block it no matter what port it is running across. It makes it much easier to allow or block access to certain web 2.0 applications and you do not need to worry about IP addresses or port numbers.