Check Point Software Technologies boosted the top speed of its firewall and VPN software Wednesday with the announcement of its new Performance Pack. The announcement was made in conjunction with the Check Point Experience user conference being held this week in Anaheim, Calif.
The VPN-1/Firewall-1 XL Performance Pack is a software module that can be added to Check Point's software to ratchet firewall performance up over 3G bit/sec and VPN performance to nearly 1G bit/sec on off-the-shelf hardware, said Greg Smith, director of product marketing at Check Point. Those performance figures were achieved on a system using dual 2.2-GHz Intel Xeon processors, he said.
The new software also allows for up to 40,000 simultaneous VPN tunnels, the company said.
A virtual private network is a means of securely connecting to a corporate network, often remotely, using the public Internet as if it were a component of the private network.
The new Performance Pack, an upgrade from the version of the Performance Pack currently available, offers "some pretty impressive price-performance numbers" because it can employ standard hardware, he said.
The Performance Pack will be available in May at a cost of $6,000 per enforcement point. Typically, the Performance Pack will be applied to the enforcement point that receives the most traffic, though multiple points equipped with the upgrade can be clustered for added speed, Smith said.
The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.
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