Symantec Corp. has announced upgrades to its system management products that incorporate greater automation for both the client and server sides of IT operations. Altiris Client Management Suite 7.0 and Altiris Server Management Suite 7.0 are designed to automate manual management tasks, ensure business productivity tools and data are functioning properly, and help ensure license compliance.
Both suites are built upon the Symantec Management Platform, Christine Ewing, director of product marketing for the Endpoint Management Group at Symantec, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "Not only are all of the traditional Altiris products built upon this platform, but we also are extending that to integration with a variety of our security management as well as our data protection products as well."
Client Management Suite 7.0 helps streamline efforts associated with deploying, managing, securing and troubleshooting client systems. The latest release of Server Management Suite provides capabilities to discover, provision, manage and monitor server infrastructures across a range of both physical and virtual platforms. This helps IT administrators increase the availability of servers and critical business systems.
New features in Client Management Suite 7.0 include intelligent software management to help organizations deal with the complexity of managing hundreds of enterprise and home-grown software packages by auditing and categorizing known applications into a software catalog, automatically distributing software with all of the required components and performing periodic enforcement checks to ensure configuration remains intact. What this means from an end user perspective, notes Ewing, "is that systems become easier to manage and deliver."
The new release also provides increased platform coverage to enable IT client administrators to extend their PC lifecycle management control across Windows, as well as Linux and Mac, and includes a new native OS X agent with an integrated software request portal. Client Management Suite 7.0 also promotes energy conservation by establishing centralized policies that control desktop and laptop power modes. Integrated support for Intel vPro technology allows administrators to power on systems just long enough for routine off-hour tasks, such as installing software updates and patches.
"The goal of Server Management Suite 7.0 is to provide an end to end capability to not only deploy the systems and manage them, but also to monitor them as well," Ewing notes. New features in Server Management Suite 7.0 include integrated performance monitoring to enable IT administrators to identify and resolve issues impacting the availability of distributed IT servers; consolidated event management to enable organizations to collect, store and analyze performance and operational events as well as respond to critical issues; and new scheduling and change management features to help IT administrators to improve day-to-day management by giving them a view of all change activities and enabling them to easily implement maintenance windows when allowed changes can occur.
The new releases provide key capabilities to streamline and automate tasks which is "extremely important" for organizations given the difficult economic environment in which many are facing the need to do more with less, notes Ewing. For more information on Altiris Client Management Suite 7.0, go here. For more information on Altiris Server Management Suite 7.0, go here.