Enterasys preps BYOD management appliance

Enterasys has brought out a network appliance to manage, track and secure employee-owned devices in large organisations.

The Enterasys Mobile IAM bring your own device (BYOD) appliance will become available in the UK on 1 June, Enterasys announced on Thursday. It is targeted at academic and health institutions that need to support multiple devices per individual users.

"Think about an environment where you have 10 to 50 servers and are trying to manage 3,000 students who are each bringing three to four devices [into the network]," Ram Appalaraju, Enterasys's vice president of marketing, told ZDNet UK. "That's where our solution comes in handy."

The appliance can manage up to 3,000 individual devices. It can track over 45 attributes, including the IP address, device specification, device location and traffic, so administrators can deploy detailed policy management. The system is based on Enterasys software, which can scale to managing 100,000 devices in the aggregate. The software is granted with a perpetual licence.

It can track the types of security system on each device, so network administrators can define access levels according to the device's level of protection.

The appliance is available as a virtual and a hardware appliance, costing $16,995 (£10,462) and $19,995, respectively. UK pricing will track US pricing, Appalaraju said.

Enterasys says its device is 84-percent cheaper than an equivalent Cisco solution, consisting of Cisco Prime Infrastructure, a three-year licence for the Cisco Identity Services Engine, the base cost of the Cisco Identity Services Engine, and the underlying Cisco appliance.

"Customers tend to make purchase decisions based around safe choices," Appalaraju said, alluding to Cisco's dominance.