“On November 6th, AXENT let its all new firewall appliance known
as VelociRaptor out of the starting gate. Based on Cobalt’s server
appliance architecture, VelociRaptor marks AXENT’s debut into the
firewall appliance market. Firewall technology, and the eBusiness
market, has steadily steered itself towards turn-key appliance
solutions in the last couple years. Though Veloci- Raptor is a
late entrant into this market, the birth of this beasty box is
going to give prior market entrants, including the CheckPoint based
Nokia IP650, a run for the money. An enhanced version of AXENT’s
Raptor Firewall software, sitting on top of a pre-hardened Linux
operating system, VelociRaptor hardware uses the sleek, 1 rack unit
high, show-offy Cobalt based line of server appliances.“
“After exceeding $100 million in net revenue in 1999, AXENT
announced its intent to be acquired by Symantec in August in a
stock for stock transaction worth $975 million. Cobalt, founded in
1996, was recently pur- chased by Sun Microsystems, a neighboring
MountainView technology company, and leading carrier class server
vendor. AXENT develops and sells numerous information security
products and services, with its Raptor Firewalls being one of the
strongest solutions on the market. AXENT acquired the Raptor line
of firewalls through its acquisition of Raptor Inc., in February of
1998. Raptor was the first company to come out with a firewall for
Microsoft’s Windows NT enterprise operating system.”
“Similar to the Nokia IP650 firewall appliance, VelociRaptor
runs on an Intel compatible AMD-K6 platform. Its Remote Management
Console (RMC) for Windows NT and Windows 2000 makes it ideal for
organizations that need to manage firewall services remotely at
customer sites or field offices. All communication between the RMC
console and the VelociRaptor is encrypted for secure management
over a public network. Included with all VelociRaptor units is a
proxy-secured gateway-to-gateway Virtual Private Network (VPN)
tunneling capabilities. The VPN capabilities are based on the
standard IPSec protocol. Unique to VelociRaptor, VPN traffic can be
further protected with our proxy-secured technology, providing fine
granularity access control by either source or destination IP
address, TCP or UDP applications, time of day and date ranges, as
well as a variety of other authentication techniques…”