The Proventia IPS GX6116 could be considered the high-end sports car
of IPS appliances. Not only does this device include several protection
and analysis features — such as protocol analysis for more than 140
different network and application protocols, heuristics and pattern
matching — but it is built for speed. This device includes a high-end
network processing unit, as well as eight 64-bit multi-core processors,
and dual XEON x86 processors examine traffic across all seven OSI
layers. This beast of a box can handle almost any amount of traffic
thrown its way and still have resources to spare.
We found this appliance to be surprisingly simple to set up and
manage. We did hit a few snags in the set-up process though. Since this
appliance is built for massive speed, the ports are all straight
gigabit and will not talk to anything less. The other problem we ran
into was that the Java interface tends to freeze when implementing a
large policy change unless your console PC has a lot of memory. Other
than that this appliance is solid.
This device has no trouble with computing performance, but the
protection performance sits right about in the middle of what we would
expect. On the scanning portions of our tests the appliance caught most
of the attacks, and on the penetration attack it blocked everything
from getting through.
Interestingly, this appliance did not come with the famous IBM-ISS
big quick start card. Instead, it came with an entire getting started
guide. This guide is presented in their standard layout with limited
visuals. However, the guide is fairly easy to follow and understand.
The other documentation for this product is a user guide that details
configuration in more depth, as well as describing how to deploy this
appliance with SiteProtector (IBM-ISS centralized management console).
IBM-ISS has many comprehensive support plans that are available with
a support contract. These plans include levels of phone technical
support, updates and upgrades, training and many other services.
This product is at the highest end of the price spectrum. At a cost
just shy of $200,000, this product is a significant investment. Though
this product does have some very nice features, as well as high
capability, the price is only justified as part of a large Proventia
deployment. This is the ultimate sports car with all the toys, but
intended for the large enterprise.