In Good Company

Last week, Cisco had an announcement about an updated Supervisor 32 engine for its 6500 line of Catalyst switches. Understandably, this news fell under the radar of most security blogs and reports, but it's worth highlighting. The heart of this new Sup engine is the Programmable Intelligence Services Accelerator, promising L7 packet inspection and enforcement, and the focus is on getting this kind of intelligence in the wiring closet, as a blade in 6500s deployed at the LAN edge.

It's exciting to see Cisco drive this message around the need for security in the wiring closet, and for ConSentry, the timing couldn't be better. We rolled out our Secure Switching news today, and it's great to be in such good company as we drive that message. Of course, the Cisco module isn't out quite yet, and it'll max out at 2 Gbps, but we definitely get a boost from the Cisco messaging that this is the way IT should be building LANs. And it clearly broadens the message well beyond the well-worn Network Access Control path.

We also decided to have a little fun with our news and how we explain the impact on the wiring closet. If you get a second, check out our take on what this all means for enterprise networks.

--Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com