A10 Jumps Into Security Appliance Race

In what is increasingly becoming a crowded field, startup A10 Networks on Monday introduced its IDSentrie 1000 appliance, designed to add centrally managed identity-based security to enterprise networks.

Like other recent entrants in the market, A10 is trying to solve the problem of unauthorized network use by introducing a network "appliance" that drops into enterprise infrastructures to conduct wire-speed authentication, authorization and accounting of users.

According to Philip Kwan, A10's director of product marketing, the IDSentrie appliance can perform at a sustained rate of 6,000 authorization requests per second, and can draw user data from a wide range of authentication implementations and directory services, including RADIUS, Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, Linux- and Solaris-based systems, among others.

Kwan also said that A10's management program can act as a central synchronizing point for user-identification data, which can then be repopulated among the different types of servers in an enterprise's network. In many current installations, users who need access to multiple application servers are often identified in numerous directories, which can all require manual changes. "The correlation features [of the IDSentrie appliance] are a big time-saver" for administrators, Kwan said.

A10's appliance is also designed to offer a wide range of comprehensive event reports, which Kwan said could assist administrators by saving time in piecing together the hows and whys of a security breakdown. The IDSentrie appliance is available now, priced at $11,995.A10 is headed by Foundry Networks co-founder Lee Chen, and has offices in both San Jose, Calif., and Beijing, China