3Com is introducing unified threat management gear for small and midsize enterprises at the Interop show this week. The gear is aimed at customers who want 3Com's Tippingpoint security technology but at a lower scale and price point than has been previously offered, the vendor says.
The 3Com X5 and X506 appliances combine 3Com's VPN and firewall technologies with intrusion prevention/detection systems (IPS/IDS) packet inspection features from its TippingPoint subsidiary. The gear is aimed at SMEs and organis0ations looking to tightly control traffic flows into and out of a campus network.
The X5 is a desktop device, aimed at small offices with as many as 50 users. The X506 is targeted at larger networks with hundreds or thousands of users and nodes. The X5 supports 18Mbps IDS/IPS and 50 VPN users, while the X506 supports as much as 50Mbps of IDS/IPS traffic and more than 1000 VPN tunnels. Both boxes perform deep packet inspection to identify and shut down services such as peer-to-peer networking and spyware, using the same IDS/IPS engines as the enterprise-level Tippingpoint products.
The X-series devices can also be configured to limit the rate of suspicious traffic, such as packet streams which may be produced by a worm-infected PC or server. The products can use software and services from Surfcontrol for advanced web site and URL filtering.
The X5 and X506 compete with low-end and mid-range security devices such as Juniper's NetScreen 25 series Watchguard's X750e and Cisco's Pix 501 appliance. The X5 starts at US$1000 for a 25-user licence, and $1200 for an unrestricted licence. The X506 starts at $4000. Digital Vaccine annual services for the X5 and X506 start at $500 and $1300, respectively. Web content filtering for the X5 and X506 costs an extra $200 and $700, respectively.
