The NETGEAR ProSecure STM150, STM300 and STM600 all contain the same security functions with increasing amounts of bandwidth to support SMBs of up to 600 concurrent users.
The company said that the lower prices come from patent-pending "web-optimized Stream Scanning architecture". NETGEAR has partnered with Kaspersky Lab [related announcement] for anti-malware and antivirus technologies and Commtouch [related announcement] for email and web security filtering technologies included in the ProSecure appliances.
The scanning engines work in parallel with a NETGEAR heuristics engine to protect against known and unknown threats. The STM can be deployed anywhere behind a network firewall and runs without reconfiguring mail servers or web proxies.
The STM series uses a simplified licensing model that does not use per-seat or user fees. There are just Web, Email and Maintenance and Support licenses to purchase. NETGEAR notes that the number of concurrent users is practically limited by the compute power of the hardware platforms.
Features include a full "enterprise grade" anti-malware engine with "advanced" scanning algorithms and a signature library of "hundreds of thousands" of malware signatures, "zero hour" heuristic-based threat protection, distributed Spam Analysis architecture that uses an "in the cloud" approach to classify and detect new Spam types "within seconds" of its appearance and "enterprise-class" web filtering technology with 64 categories for specific and targeted administration.
The STM150 is available now at an estimated U.S. street price starting at $1,000. The STM300 and STM600 are due in the second quarter of 2009.