Citing a sampling of customer sites carried out by Giga Group, the Sunnyvale, California-based appliances vendor claimed that once acquisition, support, deployment and operation costs are taken into account, its systems provide a more cost-effective option than more traditional security approaches.
NetScreen’s products are purpose-built security appliances that include a custom-designed ASIC for accelerating encryption and firewall functions, a high-performance multi-bus architecture and embedded high-speed RISC CPU and a dedicated operating system. Its GigaScreen-II ASIC allows multiple chips to be connected together across a switched backplane to scale security-processing capacity. Rather than only accelerating security features as a co-processor aiding a traditional CPU, the ASIC acts as a flow processor handling network packet processing tasks that have previously been left to a security system’s central processor. NetScreen’s systems are built to offer firewall, virtual private network, denial of service protection, and traffic management features, with room to accommodate new applications such as voice over IP, wireless and gigabit Ethernet LAN, in a single system.
Giga examined the economics of running such a system against the costs of expanding and replacing firewalls where the hardware, operating system and security application were not integrated. Appliances were found to offer cost benefits compared to the capital, licensing, service and support subscription, and ongoing maintenance costs for a hardware, operating system and security application combination that is not fully integrated and developed by a single vendor.
Source: Computerwire
