SteelCloud's AVG (Anti-Virus Gateway) is designed to provide enterprise-class anti-virus. The hardened box is designed with network managers and ISPs in mind.

by ISP-Planet Staff [September 3, 2003]

SteelCloud's latest product, the AVG (Anti-Virus Gateway), is a purpose-built box that delivers Computer Associates eTrust anti-virus software to networks. The box has no video, keyboard, USB, mouse, or floppy drive.

Explains Brian Hajost, executive vice president of SteelCloud, "server rooms have contractors and other non-ISP personnel. Our box is hardened physically to protect it. Our competitors use off the shelf hardware that comes with keyboard and mouse ports. We designed our box and eliminated all the things it shouldn't have."

Another issue anticipated by the SteelCloud design team is downtime. The AVG has a removable flash memory that stores custom settings. This memory module (called the Rapid eXchange Module or RXM) can be removed and installed in a replacement box.

Boasts Hajost, "You cannot just plug in a new box and run it. You have to re-personalize it, and this is our solution. We do it for our anti-virus box, which can have megabytes of data, and for our IDS box, which can have 100 MB of data. We did this because we had design meetings visualizing how customers would use the appliance. Our competitors are not cognizant of how these boxes are used."

Other features include:

• Automatic quarantine to isolate infected nodes before they contaminate the network
• HTTP traffic throughput of 2.1 MB per second (1U configuration) or 3.5 MB per second (2U configuration)
• SteelCloud Secure Console (also called SC²) for remote management
• Reporting through the appliance's Report Builder, LDAP, or any ODBC-compliant tool
• Hardened version of Windows

Pricing and availability
The AVG is available now. Pricing was not disclosed, but the product is priced to provide enterprise-class security to business customers. "Maybe ISPs can provide this as a service to businesses that cannot pay $13,750 for anti-virus," says Hajost.

—End