NAC NEWS UPDATES

The following is a list of new things out there in the Cisco NAC World. The NAC Market is continuing to grow in 2009 and with the growth the products will continue to evolve, get better and have more options.

Security Options Abound: New NAC Release

My friends over at TechWiseTV are a huge multi-media machine, producing video, audio and podcasts. Well this PodCast is on NAC 4.5, Alok Agrawal of the NAC Business Unit and Myself dive into some of the cool features of 4.5. All of the podcasts can be subscribed to through iTunes.

To access the NAC podcast go to:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns719/html_TW/tw_episode_198.html

And to get more information on all the great stuff coming from Techwise TV visit:
http://www.mytechwisetv.com/
or
http://cisco.com/go/interact

NAC Layer 3 Out of Band Design Guide That Uses VRF-Lite for Traffic Isolation

Cisco wrote a new configuration guide on using VRF-Lite for traffic isolation. This is a great configuration option for NAC, but with that said never re-design your network just for NAC. VRFs can become very complex and introducing new technology into the network should be carefully planned. Using VRFs in a enterprise network does make sense, but the reasons for moving to the new network design should be a combination of the added features/benefits for Security(NAC, Guest Access, Wireless, etc.) and Network managebility, throughput, and scalability.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6128/products_configuration_example09186a0080a3a8a7.shtml

New NAC Profiler Release

Last month a new maintenance release of Cisco NAC Profiler came out. 2.1.8-38 brings a good list of BugFixes and minor enhancements.

One Minor Enhancement that made it was Endpoint and Directory Timeout Unified Into Endpoint Timeout, which gives us more control on how to age out endpoints out of the database.

Find all the Fixes and information in the Release Notes.

The Release Notes can be found:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/nac/profiler/release_notes/218/218rn.html#wp101317

The new software can be download at:
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/nacprofiler-2.1.8 (Requires Valid Smartnet Contract)