Introducing Faster Virus Scanning with Fortra's Powertech Antivirus on IBM Power
IBM® and Fortra share a decades-long partnership dedicated to delivering solutions that precisely meet our clients’ security needs. Fortra’s Powertech Antivirus solution provides native virus protection software for all IBM® Power® operating systems, including IBM AIX®, IBM i, and Linux. Powertech Antivirus is ideal for organizations that have invested in IBM Power infrastructure and use it to run mission-critical workloads.
The Powertech Antivirus offering provides native scanning capabilities on IBM Power partitions. Using a native solution such as Powertech Antivirus prevents issues such as scan failure and security policy limitations, ensuring that each platform in a client’s Power environment is uniquely protected against viruses, worms, and other malware threats. Powertech Antivirus stays up to date by automatically applying the current virus definitions and detection heuristics.
A frequent customer requirement when running antivirus solutions is minimizing the scanning overhead. The most recent release of Fortra’s Powertech Antivirus introduced a new functionality, multi-threaded scanning for AIX and Linux endpoints, to deliver massive performance improvements.
Multi-Threaded Scanning
While on-access scanning in Powertech Antivirus already utilized multi-threading for optimized performance, on-demand scanning was limited to single-threaded execution. On-demand scans can now leverage those capabilities in the new version 6.3.0 of Powertech Antivirus.
The new version allows on-demand scans to be run in multi-threaded mode, providing clients with a reduction in scan time of up to 80%.1 This dramatic improvement allows Power clients to scan massive file systems holding millions of files in a shorter time than ever before. Reducing scan time, in turn, allows clients to perform more frequent scans of their systems; it also enables more files to be scanned during limited maintenance time windows, such as during weekends.
Fortra’s testing showed that the more the following factors coincide, the more pronounced the advantages of multi-threaded scanning become:
· The Power partition has multiple logical processors assigned, and idle CPU power is available during some periods of time
· Large file systems
· A large number of compressed files and archive formats (Zip, ISO, Tar, Cab, etc.)
· Scanning uses more “intensive” scan configuration settings, such as scanning inside archives or using heuristics-based detection
Fortra’s internal testing included one scenario where the use of 16 simultaneous scan threads increased scan speed by a factor of five. Even the use of only two simultaneous threads almost halved scan time compared to the single-threaded scan mode. The exact amount of speed-up depends on the environment of each client.
Organizations have strong incentives to eradicate malware from their environment in a time of increasing security threats and stringent compliance regimes. With Powertech Antivirus on AIX and Linux on IBM Power, clients can strengthen their security profile and meet various regulatory compliance profiles, even in the presence of limited scan windows and expanding file systems.
Summary
As technology continues to evolve, the introduction of multi-threaded scanning with Fortra Powertech Antivirus for AIX and Linux benefits Power clients who are looking to significantly reduce the time it takes to conduct scans.
We look forward to working with clients and Business Partners to meet their security objectives with Fortra Powertech Antivirus on IBM Power and to realize the advantages of the new capabilities this solution has to offer.
Get Started
Learn more about Fortra Powertech Antivirus here.
New to Fortra Powertech Antivirus on IBM Power? Reach out to a rep for details.
· Geoff Fischer, Geoff.Fischer@fortra.com
· Remsen Meyer, rmeyer@ibm.com
1 Based on Fortra’s Internal Testing with Power9 running in Power8 compatibility mode and AIX 7.3.0.0, individual results may vary.