Secure Computing Corp. this month plans to unveil a line of firewalls that combines the best features of two separate lines and at the high end doubles to 1 million the maximum number of simultaneous connections supported vs. earlier versions. The Sidewinder G2 appliances eventually will replace the company’s current Sidewinder firewall and the Gauntlet firewall it acquired a year ago from Network Associates Inc. The new line will feature six firewalls, ranging from the small-office Model 25 to the high-end Model 4000, plus a management appliance based on technology that borrows heavily from the Gauntlet line.
Standard set to roll
The long-delayed iSCSI standard is set to gain Internet Engineering Task Force approval within weeks, which means it’s “put up or shut up” time for vendors that have cited its incompleteness as justification for failing to support the IP storage specification in their arrays. Despite a flurry of iSCSI-related activity by secondary players last week, the wholesale deployment of next-generation storage technology will remain dampened until system vendors such as EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. implement iSCSI-enabled arrays, experts say. “It takes more than one vendor to do this – it takes the entire industry to offer support for it,” commented Jamie Gruener, senior analyst with The Yankee Group.
Shoring up security
Internet Security Systems Inc. last month reinforced its security management package, SiteProtector, to let it manage and correlate information about security events from across its family of intrusion-detection and vulnerability-assessment products. SiteProtector 2.0 provides a central console that unifies ISS products such as Internet Scanner and the Black Ice desktop intrusion-detection system (IDS) and firewall software, which previously required separate management consoles. According to an independent lab that tested SiteProtector 2.0, the new ISS central management console makes it far easier for network managers using ISS products to get an accurate picture of attacks while lowering the likelihood of false positives.
