Symantec last week announced a family of all-in-one security appliances that will give customers a variety of ways to beef up security without adding multiple devices to their networks.

The Symantec Gateway Security Appliance 5400 models combine an Internet gateway firewall, anti-virus, Web filtering, anti-spam, and intrusion-detection and intrusion-prevention technology to support from 65,000 simultaneous users connections on the 200M bit/sec speed Model 5420 to more than 200,000 on the Model 5460, which reaches 1.8G per sec.

The 5400 line is intended to replace Symantec's year-old 100M bit/sec Gateway Security Appliance, the vendor's first multi-function gateway that lacks the ManHunt-technology intrusion-detection system (IDS)/intrusion-prevention technology that Symantec acquired when it purchased Recourse Technologies. Attached to the corporate LAN at the Internet's perimeter, the Symantec multi-function gateways play the role of the firewall, while also blocking employee access to unauthorized Web sites, stopping spam and checking for possible computer viruses. With ManHunt technology, the Symantec gateway could be set up to monitor as a passive IDS or actively block-specified attacks.

In the realm of the all-in-one security appliance, Symantec competes against CrossBeam, Internet Security Systems, NetScreen Technologies, Network Associates and TippingPoint Technologies, although few vendors can pack it into one box without having to rely on technology partners.

All three Gateway Security Appliances can report event activity to the Web-based Symantec management console, and customers can design customized policy-configuration management templates for remotely configuring settings at the gateway, according to Howard Lev, Symantec's group product manager. The older gateway appliance that these replace was limited to Microsoft Management System.

Although multi-function gateways are still fairly new and raise the possibility of a single point of failure unless carefully set up with load balancing and failover, some network managers are keen to buy them because they might be able to simplify security monitoring and management.

At the Omaha World-Herald, the 4,000-employee Nebraska publishing and direct-marketing company that is beta-testing the midrange version of the Symantec Gateway Security appliance 5400, firewall administrator Greg Zill says he wants to use an all-in-one gateway to get a "management dashboard" to view events and monitoring related to anti-virus, spam and firewall use.

Click to see: Symantec Gateway Security Appliance 5400