Blue Coat released the SG400 at the low end of its web security appliance line, but said that in terms of web-born virus scanning, it is just as fast for a quarter of the price of NAI’s high-end WebShield e1000 appliance, also announced this week.

NAI’s e1000 is a virus gateway aimed at large enterprises. It scans POP3, SMTP, HTTP and FTP traffic for viruses, to stop them before they reach the desktop. Blue Coat’s SG400 scans HTTP and FTP, but cannot stop viruses spreading by non-web email.

The e1000, priced at $20,498 for 501 to 1000 protected nodes or $28,148 for 1001 to 2000 protected nodes, fits into NAI’s catalog in front of the e250 and e500. It can handle 2Mbps of HTTP traffic and scan 160,000 SMTP messages per hour, the company said, making it twice the speed of the e500 on both counts.

Blue Coat said its SG400 is the low-end version of the existing SG800 and SG6000 appliances. At $3,495, it can handle 2Mbps of HTTP traffic, but requires an iCAP-compatible antivirus server from Trend Micro or Symantec to scan viruses.

The SG400 also only supports up to 100 nodes. To get the same number of protected nodes as in a e1000, the $5,995 SG800 would be the appliance.

Blue Coat said that a company would spend $40,000 for a redundant pair of e1000s, just to get the same kind of HTTP throughput that its SG400 can supply for around $10,000 (as a redundant pair with the optional iCAP virus scanner).

However, this comparison only holds water when you’re looking at deploying a scanner for only web-born viruses (which should mean you already have a system for scanning POP3 and SMTP email viruses in place).

The Blue Coat system can also be configured for content filtering, with Websense Inc or Secure Computing Corp software added on, and instant messaging management, with a Blue Coat in-house IM module added on.

The NAI system currently contains basic blacklist-based spam filtering and keyword-based content filtering. Upgrades are expected in the second half of 2003, when NAI is due to integrate anti-spam technology brought in with a couple of recent acquisitions.

Source: Computerwire