Nortel Networks enhances intelligent Internet security solutions portfolio

Nortel Networks has announced enhancements to its Intelligent Internet Security Solutions portfolio designed to make securing networks easier and more flexible for network administrators while providing multi-gigabit data throughput, critical for high-volume enterprise sites and service providers.

"These enhancements to the Intelligent Internet Security Solutions portfolio demonstrate our commitment to providing customers with robust networking equipment designed to deliver a safe architecture without compromising performance, network accessibility or speed," said Sirshem Moodley, Chief Technology Officer, Nortel Networks SA.

"Security presents a dynamic challenge, but we feel we have eliminated the trade-off between a secure network and a high-performance network," Moodley said. "These latest security upgrades offer features that augment defensive efforts, while at the same time accelerating network functionality."

The cornerstone of the Intelligent Internet Security Solutions portfolio is Nortel Networks Alteon Security Cluster, designed to deliver multi-gigabit per second acceleration of security applications. Alteon Security Clusters have been fortified with the upgraded software capabilities of Nortel Networks Web Operating System (Web OS) version 10.0; increased secure traffic processing with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Accelerator 3.0; and introduction of the mid-range Alteon Switched Firewall System for enterprise customers requiring fewer concurrent sessions.

"Nortel Networks has leveraged its IP security and load balancing expertise from the Alteon product line and married it with industry-leading firewall technology to create a compelling next generation security solution for the enterprise," said Joel Conover, senior analyst, Current Analysis. "The combination of Nortel Networks Alteon Web traffic management and SSL acceleration tools enable Nortel Networks to offer customers a single, secure solution without the usual associated bottlenecks and choke points."

"As more business is done over the Internet, users do not like to be kept waiting even though they realise that this is due to the security mechanisms in place," said Moodley. "These solutions that we are providing alleviate this problem. Local companies implementing these solutions will see a marked improvement in their customer response times to and from their commerce servers. These technologies would typically be deployed in data centres doing a high level of SSL transactions or experiencing high volumes of data hits on their Web servers."

Web OS 10.0 offers several new security features for Alteon Web switch products, as well as for Nortel Networks Passport 8600 Layer 2-7 switches equipped with Web Switch Module. New in this Web OS release is a Layer-7 Deny Filter that is designed to enable the Web switch to refuse any data traffic that carries known means for hacker attacks and viruses before that traffic can reach the servers in a data centre.

"In addition to defending the network from viruses and unauthorised users, strengthening Alteon Security Clusters positions enterprise customers to protect their critical infrastructure from internal threats," Moodley said.

Protection from application abuse is a key feature of Web OS 10.0. This is designed to enable the Web switch to monitor use of all data centre services, thus protecting network resources from internal threats that could use application scripts to gain access to unauthorised areas of the network. For hosting services, Web OS 10.0 also incorporates switch segregation, which enables multiple customers to use a single switch configured to behave as though it were a separate physical entity for each customer.

Extending its market leadership in the SSL appliance market, Nortel Networks also announced SSL Accelerator 3.0. This appliance is designed to provide secure data traffic processing by working as an integral part of Alteon Security Cluster at the entry point of data centres. Nortel Networks leads the SSL appliance market with a 61% market share, according to a report issued in February by Infonetics Research, entitled SSL Acceleration Hardware 2H01.

Alteon SSL Accelerator 3.0 offloads SSL processing, including SSL handshakes, key exchanges and encryption/decryption from Web servers, increasing performance by an order of magnitude. This, in turn, allows SSL sessions to be completed much more quickly, and increases the number of Web sessions both secure and non-secure that can be managed simultaneously. In addition, SSL Accelerator 3.0 can be equipped with a module that makes it Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) l40-1, Level 3 compliant.

Alteon SSL Accelerator extends its industry-leading feature set with end-to-end encryption that maintains SSL all the way to the Web servers for the most secure transmissions, such as those required by customers in finance, healthcare, government and managed services. Without clear text in the data path, Alteon SSL Accelerator solves the security/performance trade-off problem of traditional SSL offload devices, while adding the ability to perform global and local load balancing, session persistence and health checking.

The scalability of SSL Accelerator is ideally suited for data centres that handle large volumes of secure traffic. A single SSL Accelerator is designed to enable between 600 and 1 000 SSL connections to be processed every second. As many to 255 SSL Accelerators can be attached to a pair of Alteon Web switches to support over 250 000 SSL connections each second. SSL Accelerator 3.0 is available now.

Rounding out the portfolio enhancements are the latest additions to Nortel Networks Alteon Switched Firewall product family. The new SFA-AD3 and SFD-308 products, which are available now, provide the same ease of deployment, manageability and scalability as the original ASF, with up to 4 000 sessions per second and 600Mbps of throughput.