Cisco is introducing an intrusion-prevention sensor that is twice as fast its previous high-end device designed to protect high-speed connections to data centers and WAN links without slowing traffic.

Cisco IPS 4270 can screen for internal and external attacks depending on where it is deployed. Cisco uses a new rating system to describe the throughput of the device, giving it a speed for rich-media traffic and a separate rating for transactional traffic. IPS 4270 puts out 4Gbps for media-rich traffic and 2Gbps for highly transactional environments, the company says. It supports as many as 20,000 transactions per second.

The ratings for the previous top-end IPS, the IPS 4260, is 2Gbps for media-rich and 1Gbps for transactional environments, the company says.

The device can be managed by three platforms: Cisco IPS Device Manager, Cisco Securiy Manager and Cisco Security Monitoring Analysis and Response System (MARS).

IPS 4270 costs $90,000 for a configuration that includes four 1Gbps Ethernet ports, either copper or fiber. The chassis supports up to 16Gbps ports and has two power supplies.

Nortel has worked with Symantec to add intrusion prevention to its application switches that sit in front of data centers. Enterasys has added the same capability at 10Gbps to its Dragon switches.