Symantec Corp. has unveiled three new models of its VelociRaptor firewall/VPN appliance line, adding better performance and scalability and expanded protocol proxies to the devices.
The firewalls feature new support for redundant configurations to ensure high availability and load balancing, along with support for the new, U.S. government-approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) crypto-system and throughput of up to 100Mbps, said Kevin Krempulec, Symantec’s Toronto-based Canadian enterprise manager.
The three models will each have four 10/100 Ethernet ports and will add proxies for protocols such as H.323 and Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) used in Web conferencing, allowing them to support secure Web conferences. The appliances will also feature enhanced proxies for longer-supported protocols such as HTTP and SMTP, Krempulec said.
Another main feature of the VelociRaptor is a single management console that allows administrators to set up and define multiple rules for identical firewalls and manage them as one node, Krempulec said.
“For example, we allow you to define VPN gateway-to-gateway tunnels based on the DNS name rather than just the IP address. That makes it easy for clients that are connecting that are using DNS names instead of the IP address. And since the VelociRaptor is firewall-independent, if the head office does have a separate firewall they are using, because the VPN is IPSec it can still connect to that firewall,” Krempulec said.
Paul Weatherhead, CTO of the London, Ont.-based IT consultantcy Attach
