Check Point announces deep inspection technology that leverages multi-core processors 5 June, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

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"CoreXL is fundamental in doing deep security inspection in our security gateway to accelerate performance," said Dave Burton, director of product marketing with Check Point.

He added that CoreXL enables load sharing across multiple cores and is designed specifically to leverage open multi-core architectures such as the quad-core Intel Xeon Processor 5300 Series.

According to Burton, VPN-1 Power with CoreXL is the first network security gateway to enable security administrators to gain data center level performance while activating intrusion prevention with a strict protection profile to protect against application layer threats.

The CoreXL technology scales performance linearly using its patent-pending multi-core load sharing technologies. VPN-1 Power with CoreXL accelerates security by dynamically sharing the security inspection responsibilities between all cores on a multi-core processor. Each core independently runs VPN-1 to offer faster, comprehensive security inspection. This helps customers keep a predictable performance level when new threats appear compared to closed ASIC-based systems that lock customers into hardware refresh cycles that do not align with their evolving business or network needs.

·Some of the performance benefits of CoreXL include 12 Gbps firewall inspection that provides data centers with levels of speed for the most demanding enterprise environments. As well, CoreXL offers 5.3 Gbps intrusion prevention inspection with default settings to provide a balance between security and performance. CoreXL's 1.8 Gbps intrusion prevention inspection with strict protection offers maximum security without compromising performance.

For Check Point's channel partners, Burton said the company is looking for partners that have customers that are going to enable a lot of protection on the gateway and want customers that have high traffic environments to continue to push the limits of the technology.

"[CoreXL] doesn't make sense for smaller companies with low traffic environments. These are going to be large enterprises with very high traffic volumes [that are going to leverage it,]" he added.

CoreXL also forms the basis of Check Point's enhanced Open Performance Architecture, an acceleration framework that combines the highest levels of security with breakthrough performance and reliability allowing deep security inspection at multi-gigabit speeds.

"There are myths out in the market today that the best way to achieve the best security performance is through some kind of custom processors," said Burton. "We are trying to add more security inspection and new applications but want to do it without taking a performance hit or do it in a way where users are not impacted on a network," he added.

Check Point's open performance architecture allows companies to offload processing functions like encryption onto specialized hardware devices which can help increase performance but at the same time do a software application layer inspection.

In addition to CoreXL, Check Point's Open Performance Architecture also features SecureXL and ClusterXL. SecureXL enhances performance by offloading security decisions to dedicated hardware or a virtual software layer, making security processing more efficient. While ClusterXL enables near-linear scalability by combining multiple VPN-1 gateways into clusters, providing enhanced performance and reliability.

Burton said that CoreXL will initially be released under limited availability through Check Point's channel partners as part of its VPN-1 Power bundled offering that will be released to qualified customers.

He added that general availability of CoreXL is expected to come in the next four to five months. The barrier to wider distribution, said Burton, is that there are a limited number of hardware configurations today where CoreXL is supported on.

"Over the next several months, we will have a larger number of hardware platforms that it will be supported on. Now it's mostly Intel-based, so [CoreXL] is limited to those hardware configurations," he added.