Check Point Software Technologies on Tuesday announced a new management tool that brings the concept of software profiles to large networks with thousands of VPN and firewall gateways.
Smart Large Scale Manager (LSM) is a new component of Check Point's Smart Center Pro management software. Targeted at organizations with hundreds of branch locations -- such as retail stores, restaurant and pharmacy chains -- LSM enables a single software profile to be applied and quickly provisioned to up to 1,000 firewall and VPN gateways.
Such profiles detail information such as the type of encryption and authentication scheme to use and where to store logs. The same profile can then be downloaded to each firewall or VPN gateway with one step, says Sweta Duseja, product marketing manager at Check Point.
LSM assigns time slots to each remote gateway detailing when it should contact the management server to download the latest profile, so the server isn't inundated with simultaneous update requests.
Another new feature is a graphical user interface that enables single-view monitoring of gateways, with the ability to home in on any individual gateway to determine what policy version it is running, Duseja says.
Users can also employ multiple management servers and have each of them handle a subset of the total number of remote gateways. In that fashion, users can store different gateway profiles on each management server, or store the same profile on all management servers for redundancy.
LSM also handles logging for all remote gateways. If the primary log collection server is unavailable, logs can be directed to a backup server. Each remote gateway is also assigned a unique identifier such that it can be tracked accurately, a concern in networks where DHCP is used rather than unique IP addresses.
Smart Center Pro with LSM will be available this month for $20,000.
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