In brief: Cisco beefs up outdoor networking

Plus: Asante rolls out Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet; Blue Coat adds content-scanning security appliance.

Cisco is adding an 802.11b/g wireless LAN card to its 3200 Wireless and Mobile Router for outdoor networks. The package, dubbed the Metropolitan Mobile Networks Solution, can support wireless LAN and cellular WAN connections. The intent, Cisco says, is to extend a Cisco wired municipal or government network over a large outdoor area for police, fire, building inspectors and other users. The 3200 router can be mounted in vehicles or on utility poles. The new card costs $900.

Asanté Technologies last week introduced Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at corporations. The IC36000 Series of switches include 24- and 48-port boxes with all ports supporting 10/100/1000Base-T connections. The boxes also support up to four modular small form-factor pluggable ports for fiber-based Gigabit uplinks to a backbone.

The 48-port IntraCore 36480 with four SFP ports costs about $5,000, and the 24-port IntraCore 36240 costs about $2,500, including four SFP ports.

A new security appliance from Blue Coat Systems will let companies scan Web traffic to their network at a high speed, spotting viruses and malicious file downloads from Web pages or Web-based e-mail at the network perimeter. The Blue Coat ProxyAV is a 1U appliance that scans traffic to Web browsers for Trojan horse programs, Internet worms and malicious content buried in HTTP traffic. The appliance is available in 400 and 2000 series versions.

The 400 series comes in two models: the 400-E0, which features an 850 MHz Intel Celeron processor and 512M bytes of RAM, and the 400-E1, which comes with a 1.26 GHz Intel Pentium III processor. The 2000 series ranges from the 2000-EO, which features a 2GHz Intel Xeon processor and 768M bytes of RAM, to the 2000-E3, which features two 2.4GHz Xeons and 3G bytes of RAM. The Blue Coat Proxy AV costs from $4,500 to $21,000.