NetScreen Unveils High-Performance Security Appliance

Netscreen Technologies Monday debuted the ISG 2000, a high-performance security appliance based on the newest version of its Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC).

The box, which is available now, targets enterprises, carriers, and data center operators that need a high-performance security appliance which integrates firewall and VPN technologies, and supports intrusion detection and prevention.

The ISG 2000 can handle 2Gbps of firewall throughput and 1Gbps of virtual private network (VPN) traffic, said Netscreen, enough to support 10,000 simultaneous VPN tunnels and 512,000 concurrent sessions.

Netscreen's ASIC, which goes by the name GigaScreen3, can balance security sessions across as many as three security modules, each with dual GHz processors, a field programmable gate array (FPGA), and memory to run security applications, such as intrusion detection and prevention software.

The new ASIC and the appliance it's embedded in are especially useful for processing security threats to latency-sensitive applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP), since the GigaScreen3 can process up to 3 million packets per second for the firewall and 1.5 million packets per second for encryption.