Blue Coat unveils faster network security appliances
Web security gateways acheive 1Gbps performance
By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | Published: 09:59, 17 November 2009
Blue Coat unveiled new web gateway security appliances that the company says achieve higher throughput and scalability compared with its earlier products.
The Blue Coat ProxySG 9000 Series appliance, used for web policy enforcement and detecting and blocking web threats, supports 1Gbps throughput, an improvement over the 400Mbps in its earlier high end 8100. The ProxySG 9000 Series, which supports up to 60,000 concurrent users, is designed to check for newly emerging threats using Blue Coat's cloud-based service for obtaining threat intelligence WebPulse, which analyses URL requests in real time.
"Today, WebPulse draws from a 62 million user base" in addition to using about a dozen other methods to analyze dangerous web content, says Tom Clare, senior director of product marketing at Blue Coat.
Related Articles on Techworld
Another component of Blue Coat's secure web gateway consists of antivirus proxies that can be used to filter for viruses and other malware. Blue Coat expects to ship updated versions of its ProxyAV appliances next month, the 1400 and 2400, each supporting up to 60,000 concurrent users on a single appliance and boosting scanning performance by 40%. More efficient power supplies are said to reduce power consumption per gigabit by about a third.
Blue Coat competes with McAfee and Cisco, among others, in the secure web gateway arena. While Blue Coat's appliances are suited to protecting traditional network infrastructures, the company says it has also begun addressing protection in a virtualised or cloud-based infrastructure.
"We are going to move toward a virtualised version," says Clare, adding there isn't likely to be an official announcement about this until next year at the earliest.
