SAN JOSE, Calif. - December 4, 2007 - To address increasing traffic diversity and the growing security demands placed on enterprise networks, Cisco® today broadened its market-share-leading portfolio of intrusion prevention systems by announcing the availability of its highest-performing IPS sensor to date, the Cisco IPS 4270.
Designed for media-rich and transaction-heavy networking environments, the high-performance appliance addresses the security needs of today's business communications environment and the expanding variety of collaborative applications like voice, video and social networking tools. As high-density traffic loads become increasingly diverse and complex, more powerful and sophisticated intrusion prevention capabilities are required. The Cisco IPS 4270 handles these performance demands by providing greater throughput without compromising pinpoint traffic inspection. The IPS 4270 offers up to 4-Gbps performance for media-intensive environments that feature Web-based content and video. For networks with heavy transaction-based traffic, such as e-commerce, point-of-sale, instant messaging, and voice over IP, the new appliance provides up to 2 Gbps of throughput and supports as many as 20,000 transactions per second.
All of Cisco's IPS devices help information technology (IT) teams detect security vulnerabilities and exploits, respond promptly and precisely, and apply appropriate policies to prevent threats from entering corporate networks. However, the top-of-the-line performance inherent in the Cisco IPS 4270 enables businesses to protect their core enterprise locations with the greatest concentration of traffic.
Ideal for Data Centers
"Cisco's IPS 4270 is an integral part of an enterprise organization's data center and network security infrastructure," said David Harrison, senior consulting systems engineer at WorldWide Technologies, a large channel partner and customer of Cisco. "Our hands-on experience with this product has proved to us that corporate networks that accommodate increasingly diverse traffic loads with heavy content or transactions are well served when utilizing the appliance's high-performance capabilities. As our customers support varied media-rich content, we need precision-based traffic inspection that doesn't undermine the efficiency of their network's information delivery. We want to offer speed and sophisticated security, and neither should come at the expense of the other. The IPS 4270 allows large businesses to achieve the best of both worlds."
Besides high performance, the Cisco IPS 4270 has several other features that are ideally suited for data center environments. Because data centers are naturally complex (every enterprise typically features a unique, customized architecture to support specific traffic demands), the IPS 4270 appliance is designed to be both flexible and virtualization-friendly. The appliance enables IT organizations to "virtualize" both inspection and policy information, allowing intrusion prevention services to be woven into the overall data center system.
The IPS 4270 appliance includes redundant, hot-swappable power options and a scalable interface that accommodates high-density copper and fiber Gigabit Ethernet ports. It supports thousands of interfaces for virtual local-area networks (VLANs). It integrates with Cisco's IPS Device Manager for standalone management. For multi-unit deployments, the Cisco IPS 4270 Sensor integrates with Cisco Security Manager and Cisco Security MARS (Monitoring Analysis and Response System) to help ensure collaborative central management across a network security infrastructure.
"Cisco has made a conscientious effort to design a flexible, powerful and virtualization-friendly IPS device that meets the critical needs of high-traffic environments," said Mick Scully, vice president of product management for Cisco's Security Technology Group. "The IPS 4270 marks a new chapter in both Cisco and the security industry's evolution toward making intrusion prevention and traffic inspection supportive of networks that feature everything from collaborative Web 2.0 applications to continuous high-density transactions. Simply put, the IPS 4270 has the performance to address today's real-world enterprise and data center requirements."