McAfee launches MOVE platform
The first solution to be deployed aims to speed anti-virus performance in virtualised environments
McAfee MOVE is a set of APIs designed to improve security performance
McAfee has launched its Management for Optimised Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform, designed to speed up the delivery of security and management solutions for virtualised environments.
Launched at the McAfee focus 2010 event in Las Vegas, the anti-virus capable solution is the first to be delivered within a virtualised infrastructure.
Brian Foster, product manager at McAfee explained the problems created by trying to run a traditional anti-virus product in this way. “When you have anti-virus running on ten virtualised machines and they all attempt to scan at once, I call it AV storming. It kills your CPU and destroys performance,” he said.
However, this platform consists of a set of APIs that sit on top of a hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor. The idea is to optimise security functions while minimising performance overheads.
This enables the system to offload the scanning requirement to a guest virtual machine (VM) operating on the same machine, meaning that the scan only needs to run once.
Paul Rolfe, vice president of technology alliances at McAfee, said that the technology allows a greater density of virtual machines on a server as it frees up resources.
“Companies are looking to get a decent return on investment and if security doesn’t support that, the whole initiative is a waste of time,” he said.
Candace Worley, senior vice president and general manager at McAfee, explained how the technology works. “Files that have already been scanned get cached. When other applications want to access that file, even if they’re sitting on another virtual machine, they know it doesn’t need to be scanned again,” she said.
Worley quantified the improvement in VM density that she said the platform can provide. “The VM density on a server hypervisor is much greater with MOVE. In our joint testing with Citrix labs, we saw a threefold improvement in VM density over traditional methods.”