New Delhi : Trend Micro today announced the results of an in-depth, third-party lab test benchmarking the performance of the anti-virus/anti-malware capabilities of Trend Micro Deep Security, McAfee Total Protection for Endpoint and Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 within virtual environments. The tests found that Trend Micro Deep Security performance was up to 11 times more efficient in the use of key system resources than the competing solutions. The savings in resource consumption afforded by Trend Micro Deep Security will allow organizations to increase the number of virtual machines per host, known as virtual-machine densities, leading to capital and operational expenditure savings from reduced hardware and an increase in ROI of the virtualization investment.

Conducted by The Tolly Group, a premier third-party IT test lab, the test focused on the impact each solution had on the host system (the physical server) resources specifically as virtual machine densities increased to up to 100 virtual machines (VMs).

“Trend Micro Deep Security proved to use significantly less resources than the McAfee and Symantec solutions, even during light workloads that kept the antivirus agents essentially idle. In addition, because it was virtualization-aware, the Trend Micro solution was able to avoid triggering classic antivirus storm conditions – scheduled scans and pattern updates – where the other solutions faced significant performance degradation and stability loss,” said Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group. “Of the products tested, Trend Micro Deep Security is best equipped, in our opinion, to support an organization’s virtualization efforts.”

The Tolly Group concluded that:

1. During periods of light anti-malware activity, Trend Micro Deep Security consistently consumed significantly fewer CPU, RAM and disk I/O resources compared to the competing non VM-aware solutions. Symantec and McAfee were observed to consume 1.7 to 8.5 times the amount of resource overhead consumed by Trend Micro even when essentially idle.

2. Trend Micro Deep Security could support a scenario of more than 100 desktop VMs per host, while The Tolly Group reported that the surge in resource demand with Symantec and McAfee degraded system performance and reliability to a significant degree that prevented these solutions from being tested beyond 25 VMs.

3. With on-demand scans at 25 desktop VMs per host, McAfee resource consumption overhead was reported to be 2.8 times more than Trend Micro for CPU and 11 times more for RAM. Similarly, Symantec resource consumption overhead was 2.4 times more than Trend Micro for CPU and 4.7 times more for RAM.

4. Trend Micro’s lower resource consumption and antivirus storm avoidance supports a VM density improvement in the range of 29 to 275 percent more than that supported by Symantec and McAfee.

“Deep Security is the only product in the market with an agentless anti-malware architecture specifically built for VMware vSphere and View environments,” said John Maddison, executive general manager, Data Center Business Unit at Trend Micro. “The Tolly report validates that Trend Micro has delivered on its design goals of consuming significantly fewer system resources and supporting higher virtual machine densities compared to legacy antivirus solutions. According to Trend Micro calculations, all things being equal, switching to Deep Security agentless anti-malware can save a 1000 server VM organization half a million dollars over a 3 year period.”

Server and desktop virtualization are essential elements of any IT strategy that seeks to decrease capital and operational expenditures in IT. Many organizations simply deploy the same anti-virus solution that is in use on their physical server and desktop systems. Because these traditional anti-virus solutions are not designed specifically for virtual environments, they can create significant operational issues such as anti-virus storms, resource wastage and administrative overhead, and hamper the organization’s objective of maximizing VM densities. Trend Micro Deep Security is designed to be virtual machine aware and reduce operational security issues in virtual environments.

“I love the concept of agent-less anti-malware. It’s a huge jump over the status quo of using traditional non-virtualization optimized security in virtual environments – which is having to manage, configure and patch agents on a continuous basis and having to live with system scans and pattern updates that bring down the host machine. Trend Micro and VMware are taking security in virtual environments to an altogether new level,” said Sandy Cohn, VP, ATEC, an Albany-based IT consulting company specializing in infrastructure, storage, and virtualization solutions.

Trend Micro leads the worldwide market for corporate server security with an estimated 22.9 percent market share, according to a recently published report by IDC. (1) In addition to agentless anti-malware, Deep Security, the Trend Micro flagship product for server security, also incorporates other specialized security technologies including IDS/IPS, web application protection, firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection in one integrated solution.