The Island team, creators of high-performance router/firewalls, releases Island firmware Version 4.1. introducing two new major capabilities: OceanView™, a big-board monitoring tool for managing multiple Islands, and Cross Connect, a patent-pending approach to secure device communications across network segments that includes multicasting. The 4.1 release is available immediately across the full product lineup—Island, Island Pro, and the upcoming Island Pro Mini—via the web and mobile app, alongside roughly three dozen additional fixes and enhancements, including PPPoE support.
OceanView: One View, Every Island
Built for integrators and multi-location businesses managing many Islands at once, OceanView delivers a single, real-time dashboard indicating network health, device activity, and security status across an entire fleet of Islands. Columns can be customized to streamline the view; Islands are sortable by model, group, or status. Each monitored Island updates the OceanView dashboard every minute; Internet and interface state changes update immediately. Hovering over an alert displays message context to help determine further action. "Integrators have been asking for this, and we listened," said Tom Gallo, Island’s Chief Revenue Officer. "The team has built something elegant here—a way to spot issues as they occur and resolve before the customer is affected."
Cross Connect: Precision Access across LAN Segments
This feature does more than enable multicasting, although that alone is a meaningful addition. Its real innovation is a new method for letting named devices or device groups initiate communication with other named devices or groups across LAN and VLAN boundaries. For example, a group of cameras may need to talk to a network video recorder on a different LAN, or a SONOS controller may need to talk to speakers on a separate VLAN. Two factors set the Island implementation apart from that of competitors:
1) Security remains intact: Only named devices can connect; everything else on the segments stay isolated, preserving the protection that network segmentation is meant to provide in the first place.
2) Simplicity, an Island flagship, makes setup easy: Cross Connect is configured by device or group names rather than IP addresses and Island takes care of all routing, avoiding the complex setups typical of other firewalls.
About Island
Island router/firewalls are built by a team with 40-plus years of expertise in enterprise and carrier network technology, backed by more than 100 U.S. patents and numerous industry honors. Island is a registered brand of PerfTech, founded in 2001 and headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.