The Canton, Massachusetts-based company’s portfolio of NS Series appliance runs on the Standard Edition of ISA, with models that range from the NS6250i for the SMB market, with support for around 100 users and a list price around the $3,000 mark, to the NS8400, with support for up to 4,500 users and a price tag around $17,000.
With the launch of the Enterprise Edition, Network Engines will be unveiling more of a new family than an extension to the existing on, argued Gareth Green, the company’s GM for EMEA and APAC, in that it will target the distributed enterprise market, touting the ability for centralized management that the new version of the OS will enable.
The other major difference with Enterprise is that it supports up to 32-node clustering, such that very large enterprises will be able to deploy multiples of the high-end of the new range in clustered configurations, rather than having to acquire a huge monolithic one, he went on. No pricing for the new devices was available.
Green said the Universal Threat Management (UTM) epithet that is so popular in the security appliance market right now could not be applied legitimately to the NS Series, nor even to the new range, since they do not include IDS/IPS technology. Instead he preferred the term multi-function Microsoft security appliances.
Their main focus is really content security, since they offer app-level firewalling, Web filtering and caching, with Websense Web Security suite bundled onto the boxes and activated via a separately licensed software key.
As to the competition, Green said the company’s main adversary is Blue Coat, with Network Engines’ differentiation being that it is ISA- rather than Linux-based like Blue Coat.
This is more than a mere technical difference, of course: the NS Series is Microsoft-endorsed and thus leverages not only the traditional security channel, where it goes up against Blue Coat directly, but also Microsoft channel partners, who will clearly prefer to push an ISA-based product over a Linux-based one and may not even have been offering a security product prior to the advent of Network Engines.
