New KBOX scales up to 20,000 managed endpoints 14 April, 2008 By Chris Talbot

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

The new KBOX appliance supports the management of double the number of endpoints previous versions supported, said Wynn White, vice president of marketing of KACE. The KBOX appliances continue to server as KACE's "single box" appliance alternative for PC lifecycle and server-side management for the mid-market.

One new feature is a new client-server communications protocol dubbed KBOX Agent Messaging Protocol. Additionally, KACE has extended the KBOX Remote Replication feature for enhanced support for remote office management. According to KACE, the two capabilities dramatically improve performance to provide real-time visibility and control for addressing compliance, management and security issues. The features were also designed for more simplicity and cost-effectiveness in the management of remote sites.

"We're providing that cradle-to-grave lifecycle to management. We are indeed what we call a true appliance architecture," White said. KACE's value proposition is in the ability of its appliances to be installed in one day at one-third the cost of software alternatives, he added.

With customers facing an environment of very stringent regulatory compliance and an increasing number of zero-day security vulnerabilities attacks, they're also having to deal with an expanding number of nodes within its network, said Marty Kacin, CTO and co-founder of KACE.

"Our customers are also, interestingly enough, starting to actually do larger-scale server-side operations, so not only are their desktop numbers going up, but so are their datacenter numbers going up," Kacin said.

Although the KBOX has been traditionally aimed at the mid-sized enteprise market, Kacin said KACE is seeing a greater draw with larger enterprise customers. The company is signing on more customers with higher seat counts, as well as businesses with larger remote sites that they need to be able to manage centrally, he added.

To meet changing requirements, KACE has been stepping up the number of supported nodes per machine in each new version of its KBOX appliances while also increasing the ability of management tasks, Kacin said.

"We're obviously reducing energy costs and space requirements," both of which are important to enterprises today, he said. KACE sells the KBOX in both physical and virtual appliances.

In the latest version of KBOX, KACE has also optimized the entire appliance architecture by integrating all layers of the appliance and tuning each component for more scalability, Kacin explained. That enables KACE to squeeze a lot more control and processing power out of a CPU, he said. By doing this in a central way, it also provides the end-customer with higher levels of security and better integration between servers and nodes, he said.

"It reduces the complexity, but it also reduces the cost to our customers," Kacin said.

KACE has also included new interface integration between all of the KBOX lines in the new release. Other new features include upgraded reporting features that flows over the two KBOX lines, more powerful and graphics-based reporting, support for Mac, Red Hat, Solaris, Mac 10.5 and Windows 64-bit.