Just days after announcing that it would acquire Finnish firewall maker Stonesoft for $389 million, McAfee on Thursday released a new network intrusion prevention system (IPS) appliance based on technology from its parent, Intel.
McAfee Network Security Platform NS-series is a high performance IPS with throughput of up to 40 Gbps, and offers increased scalability and more capacity to run next generation IPS services, McAfee said.
Teaming up, Intel and McAfee engineers worked closely to develop a hardware platform that maximizes the efficiency and amplifies the performance of the new hardware design, resulting in McAfee’s first IPS hardware platform based on Intel technology.
More compact than its previous appliances, the new series offers high port density, allowing customers to more easily scale to support growing network demands.
“Although the raw throughput of the new McAfee NS-series is impressive by any measure, the real story is the full next generation IPS services at those throughputs,” said Pat Calhoun, senior vice president and general manager of network security at McAfee. “The IPS industry has been talking about next generation IPS functionality for several years now, but when scalability tests are run, these services are almost always disabled, sacrificing security to boost throughput. These next generation IPS services, such as application visibility, situational and behavioral analysis, are needed to address today’s advanced threats.”
Starting with a MSRP of US$165,000.00, the NS-series delivers 40 Gbps of performance with all of the NGIPS services running, according to McAfee’s metrics.
“Security buyers seek more application visibility, more situational or context awareness of network interactions, and greater control over the content coming into and out of their organizations,” according to Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner in a recent report on Next-Generation IPS technology. “For IPS providers that offer such functionality, they stand to capture those additional security budget dollars.”
More information on the McAfee Network Security Platform is available here.
