Sun and Symantec gang up on intruders

Sun Microsystems and Symantec have partnered to produce an enterprise intrusion detection system (IDS) aimed at the high-end enterprise and service provider markets.

The iForce IDS Appliance profiles network traffic and identifies intrusions by implementing protocol anomaly detection, traffic state profiling and statistical flow analysis.

The device combines Sun's x86-based server running Solaris x86 Platform Edition, with Symantec ManHunt, a network-based IDS that offers high-speed multi-gigabit detection, real-time threat analysis and policy-based responses to guard against intrusions and attacks.

It gathers intelligence from across the enterprise to identify and respond both to known and unknown or 'zero day' attacks, at a maximum speed of 2Gbps.

"Today's sophisticated blended network attacks can cost companies lost business, diminished customer confidence, intellectual property losses, legal liabilities, and the time and money spent recovering from the attack," said Charles Kolodgy, research director for security products at IDC.

"The Sun and Symantec intrusion detection appliance provides another layer of security to complement most of the existing customer deployments that contain only firewalls and some signature-based intrusion detection systems."

Stuart Wells, senior vice president of market development organisation at Sun Microsystems, said: "With the recent release of the Solaris OS x86 Platform Edition, Sun has enabled solutions such as the iForce IDS Appliance with enterprise-class security and availability on commodity hardware."

The iForce IDS Appliance, Powered by Sun and Symantec, is planned to feature four models and be available from a suggested price of $21,995 (£13,975).