The SlimLine / FlowLine products from GigaFin Networks are inline hardware appliances targeted to front individual servers, server farms, or local networks; providing traffic management and or security services to the devices they front and potentially offloading that functionality from edge routers or core switches. Each of the appliances offers at least some form of basic attack prevention capabilities (optional in the Encryptor), and all include Gig Ethernet ports (three in the FlowLine 500--the third for out-of-band management--and two in the SlimLines). An additional enclosure--the FlowLine 500F--includes 2 SFP ports and 1 SFP/RJ45 port.

Current entries in the product line include the SlimLine 100 and FlowLine 500/500F, which provide a mix of traffic management and attack prevention features; and the SlimLine Encryptor. The GigaFin products are all offered in rectangular desktop format enclosures in which the interface ports are located on the short side of one end. The SlimLine appliances measure 3 x 6.75 x 1.375 inches, while the FlowLine 500 is 5 x 10 x 1.5 inches.

Management of the appliances is via Web GUI, Telnet, SSH, or console (RJ45); SNMP (v2) and Syslog are also supported. Also, the vendor now offers a software management console (runs on Windows) with the ability to manage multiple SlimLine/FlowLine appliances from a remote network location.

The SlimLine 100 and FlowLine 500 appliances are focused on traffic management and basic attack prevention capabilities, listing as key features the ability to monitor, alert on, and shape network traffic by aggregate bandwidth, per flow bandwidth and connection rate; detection and monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic including BitTorrent, eMule and Winny as well as support for customized packet inspection signatures; and attack prevention including DoS/DDoS, malformed packets, and UDP, SYN and ICMP flood detection. Up to 500 access control policies can be defined, and the units can be deployed as transparent bridges, routers, or NAT devices. The key differentiators between the SlimLine 100 and the FlowLine 500 is the addition of an internal hardware bypass and an out-of-band Ethernet management port on the FlowLine 500.

In addition to these core offerings, the vendor also serves the SlimLine Encryptor enclosure, which provides IPsec-based point-to-point encryption via DES (56-bit), 3DES (168-bit), or AES (128, 192, 256-bit). Up to 100 bi-directional encryption tunnels are supported, with MD5/SHA-1 authentication, manual key, IKE, IKE/Certificates, and IPsec NAT traversal all supported. Only transparent mode deployments are supported; and the attack prevention capabilities are optional.

The SlimLine and FlowLine devices are available now; pricing is listed at $2,795 for the SlimLine and starts at $3,500 for the FlowLine. The new Management Console software is included in the cost.

Contact GigaFin Networks for further information.