HEROware, Inc. the leader in High-Availability and Disaster Recovery Appliances, today announced a new original equipment manufacturing (OEM) partnership with 5nine Software, the leader in software solutions that help organizations to safeguard their investment in virtual infrastructure. With this partnership, HEROware extends its appliance product line to include the new HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V. This product is being announced and released at Microsoft TechEd Europe in Amsterdam, Netherlands June 26th 2012. This strategic partnership will bring significant benefit to service providers, resellers and businesses world-wide looking for a complete agentless security solution for the Microsoft virtualization platform that is utilizing the extensibility of the new Windows Server Hyper-V virtual switch.

“We are extremely excited to have this OEM agreement with 5nine Software,” said Lynn Shourds, CTO, President and Founder of HEROware. “We have been working together with 5nine Software for two years and we’re ready to release this product. This new virtual firewall and anti-malware solution will control network traffic between virtual machines, detect and block malicious attacks, and perform fast anti-virus scans, thus improving the security of a Hyper-V virtualized environment.”

HEROware will integrate 5nine Software and rebrand and market this combined solution through MSP’s and VAR’s world-wide; rapidly increasing market share in the U.S. and abroad for both 5nine Software and HEROware.

This new HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V provides agentless Anti-Virus (AV), Anti-Malware and Virtual Firewall for Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Release Candidates. The significance of security and compliance solutions for the cloud increases due to the rapidly growing amount of various vulnerabilities, malware, hacker techniques, and specific requirements for virtual infrastructures.

"Unlike traditional firewalls, the new HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V allows customers to programmatically manage network security on both 'per-VM' and 'per-Host' basis - said Konstantin Malkov, CTO of 5nine Software , - "We are pleased to report that HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V utilizes the first agentless Anti-Malware and Virtual Firewall solution for the Windows Server Hyper-V. The new Agentless Anti-Malware is fast, effective, and allows users to avoid anti-virus storms. This definitely decreases management costs and improves the security of Windows Server Hyper-V environments."

HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V combines multiple protection modules, including anti-malware, IDS, web application protection, log inspection and programmatic virtual firewall, in a single and centrally managed appliance.

This solution became possible with the new Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 WFP (Windows Filtering Platform) interfaces, the new architecture of the Windows Server Hyper-V Virtual Switch, as well as new powerful APIs from Microsoft. New HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V now consists of the User Mode service, which effectively implements and installs the WFP provider on the host machine, and the Kernel Mode driver, which implements Hyper-V virtual switch WPF-callout filtering. Deployment, network policies management and support of multiple guest Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, BSD and others) now is also significantly simplified. From an ROI standpoint this puts the HERO-vFirewall Security Appliance for Hyper-V much ahead of the current competition.