– Peter Doggart, Director of Product Marketing at Crossbeam (www.crossbeam.com), says:

The cost and complexity of managing security requirements in today’s enterprise data centers has created a major need in the marketplace. With new threats emerging all the time, and growing data traffic volumes and bandwidth demands, data center managers are challenged to cost-effectively manage and scale their security infrastructure, without sacrificing the performance-levels required to meet the needs of the business.

Crossbeam’s X-Series security platform is useful because it consolidates and optimizes the security infrastructure, reducing the complexity of delivering security to a large number of users simultaneously. Crossbeam does this by partnering with world-class security software vendors, and then virtualizing their software on a platform purpose-built to deliver security software at incredibly high throughput speeds, and while providing extreme reliability, ultra-low latency and the scalability to meet the future demands of the enterprise – all this at the industry’s lowest cost to operate.

What does this mean for data center managers? They are able to easily scale and provision multiple best-of-breed security applications as needed on a single high-performance platform. This makes it much easier for them to address threats as they arise. They simply add new security applications onto the X-Series chassis without having to overhaul their entire security infrastructure. It is the simplified security services management that makes the X-Series so compelling in large, high-performance center environments.

Crossbeam’s X-Series is an open, adaptable hardware and software platform that is essentially a high-performance “security architecture in a box.” The X-Series enables the easy virtualization of multiple best-in-class security applications – including firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, anti-virus software and more – all on a single high-throughput chassis that offers enterprise-class reliability and scalability.

The X-Series is the only security platform that virtualizes the entire security infrastructure – including security appliances, switches and load-balancers – providing a solution that enables easy provisioning of third-party security applications from industry-leading security leaders including McAfee, Sophos, Check Point, Sourcefire, Imperva and others.

Data Center/IT Manager benefits:
Crossbeam set out to solve the problem of how to simply and efficiently deliver security services within large networks without sacrificing security performance. Today, Crossbeam’s X-Series virtualizes sprawling security infrastructure and provides an architecture that lets customers easily scale and provision their security services.

Beyond ease of use, the X-Series enables data center managers to consolidate up to 50 security appliances and related network devices onto a single X-Series platform, providing savings through hardware consolidation, power reduction, and reduced management needs.

Crossbeam also preserves customers’ choice of best-of-breed security applications – enables IT managers to intelligently manage risk, accelerate and maintain compliance, and address evolving security threats and network demands.

Other benefits include:
• Delivers high-performance, low-latency security at the industry’s lowest total cost to operate, up to 70 percent lower than competitors.
• Provides the scalability, flexibility and built-in redundancy to intelligently and reliably manage traffic as demands change.
• Lowers power and cooling costs by 37 percent, reducing data center energy consumption for all security-related equipment by up to 75 percent.

My best advice to data center managers and IT managers is: don’t compromise. You shouldn’t have to choose between best-of-breed security software and manageable, high-performance infrastructure.