WatchGuard Launches XTM 1050 In NYC

By Alan Harten

The Big Apple industry get together, Interop, was chosen by WatchGuard to showcase their new high security XTM 1050.

The XTM is capable of a new high of 10Gbps firewall and 2Gbps IPSec throughput via dual quad-core Intel processors, as well as advanced crypto-acceleration hardware.

It seems almost every day the industry announces a major new threat.

Not long ago these threats would make the national newspapers or even the evening news, but these have become such common events that they now rarely seen as of interest to the public.

Not only are threats more common, they are also increasingly sophisticated, which is a serious concern to all kinds of businesses.

WatchGuard believes the answer to the problem is to make the security installed extensible in order to protect networks.

By definition this would mean it can constantly be added to or altered to deal with new problems as they arise.

The 1050 makes use of existing deep packet inspection firewalls and application proxy technologies, but it also introduces a couple of new features in HTTPS inspection and VoIP security.

HTTPS has been the security standard for some years but one of its drawbacks is that network administrators can’t perform a viable inspection on HTTPS packets.

This in turn means that the system is open to other threats, that are known as ‘drive-by downloads’.

The company claims that the new system eliminates such threats.

VoIP is another way that those with bad intentions can exploit systems, and many mid-market companies are at risk from these types of attacks.

The 1050 is said to be capable of keeping out such intrusions by using a batch of security measures, such as network address translation, port obfuscation, and SIP and H.323 proxies.

The new system will offer opt-in facilities such as spam blocking, and virus outbreak detection. There is also URL and content filtering, Anti-Virus and IPS/IDS, together with free updates and support with added security alerts.

The multi-port design of the 1050 makes it unique, with active-active multi-WAN load balancing to achieve high availability (HA), and the ability to cluster two WatchGuard XTM 1050 appliances as a single, logical unit, thus achieving nearly 2X throughput.

There is also WAN and VPN failover with dynamic routing and traffic shaping capabilities, to provide maximum network performance and redundancy for the most demanding environments.

All of this is made possible by using extensible12 line-speed, high density Gigabit Ethernet ports with the option to upgrade 4 ports to fibre.

The scriptable CLI provision means administrators will be able to create their own management security scripts and there is also roll-based access control (RBAC) so that IT managers will be able to delegate certain functions to different individuals.