NetContinuum launches NC-1100 Web application firewall and gateway

NetContinuum today introduced the next generation NC-1100 Web Application Firewall (NC-1100 AF) and the Application Gateway (NC-1100 AG). The NC-1100 product line aims to establish the application proxy as an architectural best practice in the data center with 10X the performance and 10X the ease of deployment and management of previous generation application proxies.

Application proxies provide comprehensive application assurance services to data center teams: securing the web applications from professional hackers and their methods, accelerating the user experience through caching, compression and connection pooling, and increasing application availability through load balancing and application health checks. The comprehensive application assurance feature set is delivered from a single point of control.

NetContinuum is the only vendor in the industry to have achieved ICSA certification at the network and the application layer. With a custom developed software stack from Layer 1-7 and comprehensive coverage for the application security feature set outlined by the Web Application Security Consortium (WASC), the NC-1100 is the industry’s most secure application proxy. The NC-1100 also addresses the key areas relevant to widespread adoption by a growing market:

Real World Performance: B2C and B2B sites have sustained http and https transaction rates ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand per second, but are often subject to sudden spikes in transactional rates that range from 5X-10X. To become mainstream, application proxies must provide enough headroom so that organizations can deploy it and forget about it. The NC-1100 offers price/performance leadership and comfortably handles bursts in transaction rates with ALL security features turned ON. Data Center teams also want to ensure that using application proxies actually improves application responsiveness. The NC-1100 not only has minimal latency, it typically improves the performance of the applications it’s protecting by 30 to 500 percent.

Ease-of-Deployment: In order to achieve widespread adoption, application proxies must fit easily in various networking environments while continuing to function as a full application proxy in all cases. That is, customers should not have to choose between ease of use and the benefits of an application proxy. The NC-1100 offers four application proxy networking options: One-armed proxy mode for rapid proof-of-concept, “Bridge proxy mode” for transparent deployment, Full proxy mode for address masking, and a path-breaking “Mixed mode” for large data centers that fully exploits the NC-1100’s industry-leading virtualization technology. After insertion, the NC-1100 also offers intuitive “Application Wizards” to define applications and protect them with a choice of “Preset WAFEC-compliant security policies”.

Ease-of-Management: The NC-1100 is very easy to administer on an ongoing basis and appropriate for the majority of customers. As applications change, the NC-1100 can automatically learn the changes and adjust the policies so that busy administrators strapped for time do not have to make manual policy changes. However, the NC-1100 also provides a very granular level of policy over-ride capabilities along with a “Policy Wizard” to those administrators that need it. The NC-1100’s GUI offers up a very simple but comprehensive “Application Dashboard” that provides a single console view on all aspects of application assurance: application availability, application performance, and application security. The NC-1100 makes management even easier by providing a unique “Front-End health-check” capability to failover from one system to the other at the application level with application persistence.

The NetContinuum NC-1100 AF and AG are generally available starting May 1, 2006 starting at $30,000. NetContinuum is also offering a special trade-in program to its NC-1000 installed base customers so they can enjoy the benefits of superior performance and ease of use.