IBM Unveils Fastest-Ever IPS

Published: May 29, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Voice over IP (VoIP) and other bandwidth-intensive applications can clog your network pipes and compromise the effectiveness of your Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). To help prevent this dangerous scenario, IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS) unit last week launched a new IPS, the Proventia Network IPS GX6116, that supports network environments running at speeds up to 15 Gbps, with full protection guaranteed for the first six Gbps of traffic.

IBM's ISS unit, which it acquired less than a year ago, makes and sells IPS and other IT security equipment and runs the X-Force research and development organization that collects information about what cybercriminals are doing so its customers can get better security protection.

The new Proventia GX6116 is designed to meet the needs of large enterprises that need protection for their next-generation cellular networks, cellular IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) backbone networks, VoIP deployments, and hosting environments. IBM says the new appliances can support up to eight network segments at close to network speeds, an improvement over previous IPS devices. The devices can accomplish this thanks to a custom-built architecture that splits the tasks of processing the flow of data from the task of inspecting that data, thereby increasing the performance efficiency of preemptive network protection.

One early user of the GX6116 is Metavante, a banking and payment technologies company. "The Proventia Network IPS GX6116 has provided us with a powerful means of bolstering our security posture by protecting traffic at the core of our network without sacrificing the performance of our mission-critical business applications," says Henry Gillard, a member of Metavante's computer incident response team.

The GX6116 is expected to be available by the end of June. For more information, see iss.net/.

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