Today marks the introduction of Kerio Control 7.2 in public beta, the latest evolution of Kerio's unified threat management product line. This version comes with a new Bandwidth Management and Quality of Service option that upgrades the previous bandwidth limiter

This is true Quality of Service the Kerio way. Not only is reserving bandwidth for prioritized services as simple as checking a box, but you will have the power to throttle bandwidth to help enforce Web usage policy. Yes, you can customize it: you can make Salesforce blazing fast and make YouTube painfully slow. We are confident that Kerio Control is the only product of its kind with a combination of features that are as effective as they are easy to manage.

The intuitive interface gives you the flexibility to create rules to reserve bandwidth based on the following criteria:

• Traffic type (Email, FTP, Instant Messaging, Multimedia, P2P, Remote Access, SIP VoIP, VPN, Web Browsing)
• Users with exceeded quota
• Large data transfers
• Packets matching a Traffic rule (created in Traffic Policy configuration)
• Service (extensive predefined list of services)
• Packets marked with QoS DSCP value (for prioritizing traffic over the Internet)

Here is what you can do:

• Reserve bandwidth in increments of kilobits, kilobytes, megabits or megabytes. Or--
  if you prefer--it can also be reserved as a percentage of the total available throughput for the specified Internet connection(s).
• Restrict bandwidth - a rule can combine minimum and maximum bandwidth for creating a guaranteed performance range for a service while leaving enough excess bandwidth for other services. Each rule can have separate setting for download and upload and you can apply the rule to any or all Internet links.
• Enable bandwidth charting for a given rule to view traffic volume in the Status section under Traffic Charts. Set the chart to refresh in five second intervals to view live traffic usage for each rule selected. This will help you tweak rules for optimized performance.
• By default, Kerio Control includes a preconfigured rule for SIP VoIP, which you can edit based on anticipated call volumes to ensure satisfactory call quality (a SIP phone call using a G.711 codec consumes about 10 KB/s).

Fight the wasters - support the power users

Applying QoS rules for users is straightforward and powerful. Power users can't afford to wait when uploading files to remote servers or using critical cloud-based solutions. Create a traffic policy rule for their web activity and then create a QoS rule based on that traffic policy in Bandwidth Management to reserve the throughput needed; amazingly simple yet effective.

Mac admins rejoice - UTM is coming your way

Apple Open Directory is now a supported directory for user management in Kerio Control along with Microsoft Active Directory and our own internal database. Our software and hardware appliances have been gaining traction in Mac OS X environments after the addition of our Mac VPN client. Now you can map user accounts directly to Apple Open Directory from the Domains and User Login option under User and Groups, allowing you to maintain a single user directory for your network. Which other UTM solution gives you that?

We look forward to hearing your feedback on this release and we thank you for your continued support in the development of our products. Please visit http://www.kerio.com/betas/control to download Kerio Control 7.2 Beta 1.

I welcome your questions and feedback and will respond to as many as I can in the comments section of the blog.

-James