McAfee is to tackle the problems of bottlenecks within organisations that have adopted Gigabit Ethernet. The company has introduced the McAfee M-8000 Network Security Platform to cope with the challenges thrown up by the faster network speed.

While organizations have adopted 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks to speed up connectivity, their intrusion prevention systems have failed to keep pace. McAfee claimed that its security platform would deal with this issue.

"This will address those organizations that are looking to address the security challenges thrown out by 10 Gig Ethernet," said Greg Brown McAfee's director of product marketing for network security platforms. "Previously, organizations were faced with a choice of sacrificing either performance or security; what we've said is that you have to sacrifice neither."

Brown said that what organizations had been forced to do was to introduce load balancing to maintain performance, this, he said, added a layer of complexity. "What we've done is eliminated that number of boxes that you need - which also reduces the power footprint."

He said that McAfee had been able to offer security as well as throughput because it had made an investment in silicon architecture to enable the company to deal with 10 Gig. "Other vendors have had to engineer solutions that had been designed for 1 Gig networks," he claimed.

The company has added a number of other features to the platform. The company said that it had integrated email and web security and could handle up to five million messages per hour and up to 50,000 concurrent users.

The company has also introduced a new blade server that offers features built-in failover and redundancy, a built-in resource manager, and the ability to "hot-swap" blades. The product helps companies save 25 percent on data center costs, which include power and cooling. The company said that the Content Security Blade Server also reduces space requirements, helping companies reduce the physical footprint needed to manage security.