Dave Lapp, chief technology officer at Seaway Networks Inc.
... appliances that must instantly evaluate the dangers in the endless streams of network packets. Some developers claim that the PowerPC, a general-purpose microprocessor that was designed by IBM and Motorola Inc. and that Apple Computer Inc. has long used in its Macintosh systems, has distinct advantages when it comes to security monitoring and management over, say, Intel Corp.'s CPUs. In part, that's because of the PowerPC's more liberal caching scheme, says Dave Lapp, chief technology officer at Seaway Networks Inc. in Ottawa. Lapp says designers like him can engineer the chip's specialized Level 3 cache to inspect packets without having to wait for data to transfer in and out of the computer's memory. That makes the technology ideal for running network security software, Lapp says. Lapp's company sells boards with the PowerPC and proprietary application-specific chips for use by security appliance makers.
PowerPC-based security x4 from Bivio
Bivio Networks Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif., competes with Seaway, selling specialized security hardware that's also based on the PowerPC. Paul Leisenberg, Bivio's vice president of marketing, hails the processor for its "better thermals" compared with Intel chips, saying they let his company's engineers pack four CPUs on its boards. Putting more processing power on a single card dedicated to managing network security portends a trend toward consolidating various security functions into a single box. That includes firewall capabilities, intrusion detection, virus protection and possibly compliance monitoring. Leisenberg thinks this new breed of security hardware is fast approaching. He points to a recent product release by Sourcefire Inc. as a major step in that direction. "It's not the death knell for the specialized appliance, yet," Lapp concludes. "But in five years, we'll look back and wonder why everything was separate." Juggling open-source software stacks ... ... isn't fun. That's why SpikeSource Inc. in June will ship a tested, validated and supported combination of free open-source tools such as MySQL, JBoss, Python and PHP. According to Nick Halsey, vice president of sales and marketing at the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, SpikeSource keeps track of the release and patch cycle for each of the technologies. It also tests changes to ensure that an update to one component doesn't hamper something else. Halsey says the company will throw in an automated installer and management tools. It plans to charge $295 a year for the update service. The current beta of the SpikeSource stack runs on five versions of Linux and Windows. Would you put a VoIP phone on your CEO's . . . ... desk? No way, say 63% of the 177 folks polled by Empirix Inc. at a
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