UK startup shows 10Gig cloud security
This box is faster than the rest, says founder.
By Tim Greene, Network World (US) | Network World US | Published: 18:36, 20 April 2009
A UK startup, Syphan Technologies, is using this week's RSA Conference to launch its 10Gbit/s cloud-based security-services platform that can support up to 500 customers on a single device.
The same box, the ITC220, can support 1,000 VLANs if deployed in a corporate environment providing intrusion prevention, firewalling, denial of service protection, data-loss prevention and content filtering, the company says.
In addition to high bandwidth performance, the device injects latency of just 64 nanosec using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to process its filtering. The speed enables moving packets through the box without backing up. "You can't flood our buffers because we don't need to buffer," says Pravin Mirchandani, founder and CEO of the firm.
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Competitors include Check Point, F5, Force10, Juniper and TippingPoint, but they don't have devices with the speed and scale of ITC220.
The FPGA gives the company flexibility to program in new algorithms over time, he says. To squeeze speed out of the hardware, the device breaks down its filtering into micro tasks done in parallel, a process the company calls StealthTrap.
The device can hold state of 16 million flows in its memory and looks for partial matches of known attacks. The device can send alerts if it finds enough partial matches to indicate malware is infiltrating the network, Mirchandani says. The device relies on its own inspection algorithms as well s rules from Bro, SNORT and Cisco-format access control lists. Each device supports 50,000 rules.
The device comes with management software that presents a check-box interface for customers of a service provider to use to sign up for services. The device can generate reports telling customers the benefits they could have gleanded if the had signed up for other services. So, for example, a customer that signed up for DDoS protection might get notice that the IPS service might have stopped a worm outbreak.
The device is scheduled to go into trials with four service providers in May, the company says. It costs $145,000 (approx £100,000).
