TippingPoint Aligns With Dell On Security

TippingPoint, Austin, Texas, makes an ASIC-based appliance called UnityOne that can be used at the perimeter of the network and inside an intranet to prevent denial-of-service and SYN flood attacks and keep process-table floods from spreading.

In version 4.1, the company added the ability to allocate bandwidth so network administrators can prioritize certain application traffic while throttling certain types of other traffic to preserve bandwidth.

According to TippingPoint CTO Marc Willebeek-LeMair, the TippingPoint appliance is a more sophisticated approach to network security than traditional firewalls, which have now been compromised by the need to keep certain ports open on a network.

"We think that for a lot of our customers, our offering will eliminate the need for a separate firewall," he said.

By taking an approach that inspects the content of the packets moving through the network, he said the UnityOne system can identify threats and prevent them from disturbing the network.

The Dell relationship involves Dell reselling the TippingPoint appliance to the University of Colorado at Denver. In addition, TippingPoint has signed 78 resellers as part of a bid to compete with Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco Systems, Network Associates, Fortinet, Symantec and others.

Vigilar, a security VAR based in Atlanta, selected UnityOne on behalf of its customer Weather.com because it was the only intrusion-prevention system that did not adversely impact network performance while examining packets on the network, said Joseph Dell, CTO of Vigilar.

"Most intrusion-prevention [products] affect system throughput on the network," he said. "The TippingPoint product has a negligible impact on performance."

Pricing ranges from $24,995 to $99,995 depending on the model. Units range from the UnityOne-200, a 200-Mbps product to the UnityOne-2000, a 2-Gbps product.