Networking products maker NetGear Inc has put out a new line in unified threat management appliances that will all use a novel scanning engine for ultra-fast filtering.
The company has unwrapped a trio of web and email threat management appliances for small and mid size businesses, which will incorporate the stream-based scanning technology NetGear acquired three months ago from CP Secure. This allows for real-time scanning of high-volume web and email traffic without degrading network performance.
The appliance vendor has also announced that it would be working to include email and web security filtering software from Commtouch into the three new appliances.
The entry-level model of the appliance range, the STM150 is available now and will sell at an estimated US street price starting at $1,000. That first box will be accompanied by larger STM300 and STM600 models, come the second quarter of 2009.
Unlike most of the batch-based scanning processes that are used in everything from desktop anti-spam systems to gateway anti-virus appliances, NetGear’s scan engine starts receiving and analysing traffic as the stream enters the network.
This means that the receiving, scanning, and outputting processes occur concurrently, and ensures that network performance is not impeded. As soon as a number of bytes of web traffic are available, scanning commences. The scan engine continues to scan more bytes as they become available, while at the same time another thread starts outputting the bytes that have been scanned. The result is that internet traffic is scanned virtually in real-time.
All the ProSecure STM Series will eventually also incorporate Commtouch’s Recurrent Pattern Detection anti-spam and GlobalView URL filtering services technologies.
NetGear believes its move in the market effectively raises the bar for UTM vendors targeting the SMB segments. “Other vendors targeting SMBs often use ‘watered down’ anti-spam engines that require on-site tuning, antivirus engines that contain only limited signature databases, or weak detection algorithms that have slow response times to new threats,” NetGear’s Jason Leung said.
The company has said it has also partnered with Kaspersky Labs. As with Commtouch, this anti-virus software will run on top of the NetGear Stream Scanning platform, with both of the products engines working in parallel to protect against threats.
