Enterasys this week is expected to unveil an enhanced security appliance designed to bring distributed intrusion prevention to multigigabit LANs.

The Dragon IDS/IPS system senses and responds to threats across multivendor wired and wireless networks, Enterasys says. It extends IDS/IPS capabilities to LAN edge switch access ports to detect threats, mitigate attacks, and contain or remove the source of the threat from the network.

In addition to Enterasys devices, the system works with routers and switches from Cisco, Foundry, HP ProCurve, Juniper and Nortel, among others.

Citing data from Gartner, Enterasys says the market for stand-alone IPS appliances grew 43 percent in 2007, to US$1 billion.

The two-rack unit offers 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. It is a higher-end version of an IPS system unveiled in early April.

The appliance works with Enterasys' Dragon Security Command Console for information and event management, and the company's NAC system to locate and remove the source of malicious network traffic.

The Dragon IDS/IPS system also performs VoIP traffic analysis, vulnerability signature matching, protocol analysis, and network behavioral analysis with packet capture and session reconstruction to thwart network-based and host-based threats, Enterasys says.

Pricing for the Dragon IDS/IPS system starts at about US$100,000, or less than $20,000 per gigabit of throughput performance. It is slated to be available in the third quarter.