NetContinuum Launches the NC-2000 Application Security Gateway Advancing Trend Toward Consolidated Security and Delivery Appliances
July 18, 2005 – Santa Clara, CA – NetContinuum, the company that helps IT organizations secure and optimize the delivery of web applications, today announced the immediate availability of the NC-2000 Application Security Gateway. The new high performance appliance sets industry benchmarks for processing fully secured and managed web transactions, advancing the trend toward consolidating application security and application delivery capabilities in a single appliance. NetContinuum also announced the industry’s first integrated console, giving data center managers a single management interface to effectively control the converged security and traffic management feature set.
Enterprises are now routinely deploying web applications and must meet high standards for both security and uptime. However, the complexities of deploying multiple devices in the data center and managing constant application and network changes are preventing them from meeting these goals. The NC-2000 consolidates network, application and XML firewalling; caching; compression; load balancing; traffic switching; SSL acceleration; and logging into one device – and leverages the powerful processing platform of the latest AMD Opteronâ„? processors to support the 27 step lifecycle of each HTTP transaction (see related release “Checklist for Secure Application Delivery Lifecycle”).
According to a NetContinuum 2005 survey, 75% of NetContinuum enterprise and government customers are already successfully using the optional traffic management features offered in the company’s flagship web application security gateway, the NC-1000. As a result, these leading enterprises and government agencies have reduced the number of devices deployed between their router and web application server – in some cases down to only one – and have increased the performance and security of over 720 web applications.
Leading industry analysts also signal a shift in customer purchase criteria for application traffic management, optimization and security appliances. According to Gartner, in its May 24, 2005 research note titled Application Delivery and Web Application Firewalls Are Ready to Converge by Greg Young and Mark Fabbi: “The Web application security and application delivery markets have developed separately but are ripe for consolidation. By 2008 80 percent of deployments in which there is a Web application firewall and application acceleration will have these in a single product (0.7 probability).”
They add, “Web application firewall defenses also need to rapidly evolve as new threats arise. Network equipment vendors are more accustomed to selling products that deal with new protocols or services that generally only change at infrequent intervals. A vendor that is successful at selling application acceleration products may not have the agility to maintain leadership in Web application firewall functionality.”
The NC-2000 High Performance Platform
The new NetContinuum NC-2000 leverages NetContinuum’s heritage of innovation in multiprocessing software with two of the new AMD Opteron processors to achieve new performance heights and meet today’s requirements for application security and delivery functionality in one device. The new product achieves:
” 7,300 fully managed and secured web application transactions per second as defined by the Checklist for Secure Application Delivery
” 9,000 SSL 1024-bit handshakes per second, over 52,000 HTTP transactions per second, and over 62,000 TCP terminations per second, the more traditional metrics for performance characteristics
The NC-2000 ships with the new NetContinuum Secure Application Delivery Management Console, software that makes it easy for data center managers to simultaneously secure, deliver, monitor and manage multiple web applications from a single, integrated console. This fine-grained control is made possible through full virtualization of the machine environment such that each application’s traffic flow is separately controlled and monitored.
“NetContinuum’s multi-threaded software architecture leverages the performance advancements intrinsic in the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor,” said Pat Patla, director, Server/Workstation Marketing, Microprocessor Solutions Sector, AMD. “Application security is an important weapon in any company’s IT arsenal and benefits from the robust AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture that the AMD Opteron family of processors is based on.”
“We are delighted that the marketplace is validating NetContinuum’s assertion that “terminate once’ proxies are the only way to both secure and deliver web applications,” stated Gene Banman, President and CEO of NetContinuum. “Our customer base is already enjoying the benefits of securing and managing their application traffic from a single platform. Our new high performance platform will enable larger applications and more complex data centers to begin simplifying their delivery architectures to drive higher availability, higher security and easier change management.”
The NC-2000 is available on September 1, 2005 and is priced at US$55,000. For a technical datasheet please visit www.netcontinuum.com
About the NetContinuum Application Security Gateway
The NetContinuum Application Security Gateway is a high performance integrated appliance engineered to enable the secure delivery of web applications from a single platform. All capabilities needed to secure, deliver, monitor and manage web applications are consolidated into the appliance. The system provides a simplified, integrated management scheme from which all aspects of secure application delivery are monitored and controlled. This design offers increased efficiency and flexibility enabling IT management to make quick adjustments to the application infrastructure while improving security and uptime of applications.
About NetContinuum
NetContinuum helps IT organizations secure and optimize the delivery of web applications. The NetContinuum Application Security Gateway enables security managers to safeguard their organizations from application level attacks while IT operations managers simplify and consolidate their application delivery infrastructure. NetContinuum’s unique technology enforces precise security, content and traffic rules controlled from a virtualizing management system. The Company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit us at www.netcontinuum.com