Force10 Breaks Into Security

Force10 Networks, a pioneer in building and securing 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks, today introduced the industry's first security appliance that inspects, monitors, captures and blocks traffic at line-rate 10 Gigabit speeds. Based on a patented architecture that is optimized for high speed monitoring and traffic capture, the Force10 P-Series family of security appliances supports unprecedented deep packet inspection scalability, ensuring the highest level of security without compromising network performance. "Oak Ridge has a history of leadership in advanced scientific discovery and is constantly pushing the boundaries of networking technologies to enhance our research capabilities," said Steven Carter, senior network engineer for the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Department of Energy's largest multi-program science and technology laboratory. "With the Force10 P-Series, we can inspect and monitor traffic on our 10 Gigabit links without impacting performance, making it possible to move data at line rate while still addressing security concerns." The Force10 P-Series family brings line-rate Gigabit and 10 Gigabit security to the network in a compact, one rack unit form factor. With two line-rate 10 Gigabit ports, the Force10 P10 has an aggregate inspection throughput of 20 Gigabits per second and is the industry's first intrusion prevention system that can secure 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks at line-rate speeds, eliminating costly bottlenecks. As a complement to the P10, the two-port Force10 P1 delivers inspection at line-rate Gigabit speeds. At the foundation of the Force10 P-Series is the patented Dynamic Parallel Inspection (DPI) technology, a fundamentally new architecture for signature processing that delivers the flexibility and scalability required to secure high performance networks. The Force10 DPI technology employs multiple hardware-based engines to simultaneously process thousands of rules on a single packet. The P-Series directly embeds security rules and signatures into hardware to ensure line-rate processing, inspection and monitoring of traffic on the network. The ability to write new signatures directly to hardware in real time provides IT managers with deterministic, predictable performance regardless of traffic conditions. "To inspect every packet and apply security rules at full 10 Gigabit rates is an exceptional accomplishment," said Winnie Callahan, executive director of the Peter Kiewit Institute, home to the University of Nebraska - Lincoln's College of Engineering and the University of Nebraska at Omaha's College of Information Science. "To have the ability to dynamically change rules and signatures in real time and apply them into hardware enables an entirely new set of applications for network monitoring and security." To provide further flexibility, the Force10 P-Series supports open source network security applications, enabling customers to specify policies from public domain signatures or standard network monitoring libraries. An open application program interface also allows IT managers to develop custom signatures for firewalling, denial of service attacks and packet and flow analysis applications. "The power of the P-Series lies in its no compromise approach to delivering security at the speed of the network," said Andrew Feldman, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. "As an extremely fluid problem, securing networks, particularly high speed networks, requires the kind of performance that only the P-Series can deliver, regardless of traffic conditions." Already, more than 20 government organizations, Internet exchanges and national laboratories are leveraging the Force10 P-Series to bring scalable security to their high performance networks. Among these are the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, Oakridge National Laboratory, Oxford University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, SRI International, Seaton Corp, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Peter Kiewit Institute. Despite existing network data security measures and government regulations, attacks and malware caused more than $500 billion in damages last year while the personal information of more than 57 million people was compromised. The P-Series is an expansion of Force10's product portfolio, which includes the E-Series family of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch/routers and the S-Series family of data center switches. Leveraging the high performance of its switching, routing and security solutions, Force10 is building and securing the largest and most sophisticated networks in the world.