SonicWall is expected to introduce at this week's Interop New York conference a new family of fast, multifunction gateways designed to simplify deployment and management of security for large businesses.

Called the E-Class Suite, these three new devices are based on multicore processors for handling application stateful-inspection firewalling, intrusion-detection and -prevention, VPN, content inspection, antivirus and antispyware without bogging down traffic and creating a bottleneck.

The throughput of the devices, peaking at 5G bps, is adequate to handle traffic load at most network junctions. The devices will compete against unified threat management gear from Check Point, Cisco, Juniper and others.

The largest of SonicWall's three devices is the NSA E7500, with 5G bps total firewall throughput that slows to 1G bps with all security options turned on. It has eight Gigabit Ethernet ports -- four SFP and four copper -- for flexible deployment in both fiber and copper environments. It has dual power supplies, dual fans and a high-availability feature set.

The base price is US$25,000; adding threat-prevention services to update signatures makes the cost roughly US$30,000, SonicWall says. NAS E7500 is available now.

The NSA E6500 and NSA E5500 have eight copper interface ports, no SFP ports and only a single power supply. These are not meant for data center environments where dual power would be required, SonicWall says. The 6500 costs US$14,000, $17,000 with services. The 5500 costs US$10,000, $12,000 with services. They will be available at the end of October.

If used with SonicWall's Global Management System, policies and security knowledge can be collected from each device so administrators control all the branch offices through a single interface.