Apere
Identity Managed Access Gateway: $15,000
www.apere.com

AS SMALL BUSINESSES GROW INTO LARGER ORGANIZATIONS, CERTAIN bottlenecks become more apparent. For example, a company starting out with SBS 2003 might authenticate users by way of Active Directory. The addition of a CRM suite could then add an extra layer of verification, followed by an enterprise-level ERP app. Slowly but surely, complexity weighs the network down.

Apere's IMAG (Identity Managed Access Gateway) consolidates access control and identity management issues, solving those problems. The gateway stands on its own, running Apere software that automatically locates existing identity profiles, provisions new identities, and reports usage with regulatory compliance in mind.

Access control measures enforce the policies generated by the IMAG, including a packet filtering firewall, automatic VLAN provisioning, and an authentication proxy with support for failover should one IMAG go down. A $15,000 starting price tag really suits the appliance to medium business growing pains.

Promise
VTrak J300s JBOD Storage System: $2,249
www.promise.com

JUST BECAUSE A CUSTOMER NEEDS MORE STORAGE CAPACITY DOESN'Tnecessarily mean it's time for you to build a new server. Adding a JBOD storage system, such as Promise's VTrak J300s lets you expand without changing anything. The 2U platform holds up to 12 3.5" SATA or SAS hard drives connected through a trio of SAS 4x ports. With that much raw throughput, you're able to cascade up to four J300s enclosures, totaling 48 hard drives, and still realize incredible performance.

Deploying the enclosure is particularly easy since Promise equips it with redundant, hot-swappable power and cooling modules. Simply fill the chassis with any combination of disk drives, mount it in a standard 19" rack, and connect to the external input port of your customer's SAS controller. Although the J300s might cost as much as a new server, it's one of the most affordable ways to expand capacity.

INTEL
S5000PAL Server Motherboard: $625
www.intel.com

BIZ CUSTOMERS WANTING INTEL Quad-Core Processors will want a motherboard with the company's flagship 5000P chipset, such as its S5000PAL. Drop a pair of Xeon 5300 CPUs into the board's two LGA771 sockets and you instantly have eight cores wielding compute power once only possible through prohibitively expensive 8-way servers. On a budget? Leave one socket vacant and enable a simple upgrade path.

The board's memory infrastructure is similarly flexible. Eight DIMM slots take a maximum of 32GB of memory. Naturally, you'll want to match that sort of high-end setup to a 64-bit operating system. Dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers handle even the most demanding network applications and a built-in ATI graphics processor with 16MB of memory saves the cost of a drop-in board.

Intel's message with the S5000PAL is one of flexibility. Multiple PCI Express slots, PCI-X, and six second-gen SATA ports all back the board's other scalable subsystems, creating a platform truly viable in a long-term upgrade cycle.

LG
M4201C 42" Commercial LCD: $1,899
www.lgcommercial.com

ALMOST ANY BUSINESS WITH A RETAIL PRESENCE STANDS TO BENEFIT from digital signage. LG's M4201C 42" blends attention-getting dimensions with impressive specifications and plenty of flexibility. Its 1366x768 resolution is High-def 1366x768 resolution, a gorgeous 1600:1 contrast ratio, and 178-degree viewing angles suit the non-centered audiences typical of signage applications.

The M4201C boasts a number of cool differentiating features that truly endear it to commercial signage applications. A heat sensor, for example, protects against unforgiving environments. HDCP support enables playback of next-generation high-def video formats while an RS-232C connector lets the display work in conjunction with multiple monitors controlled by a single PC. LG's M4201C is also extremely versatile, equally suited to running in a four-monitor matrix or all by itself with built-in multimedia speakers. LG protects the M4201C with a three-year warranty on parts and labor and rates the panel with a 50,000-hour MTBF.