Hardware Comes Quietly Into the Night

I'm not sure why, but hardware vendors seem to be loathe to talk about new hardware offerings. In part I think it's because they're afraid if their competitors find out they'll use the opportunity to push their hardware thinking the customer will be forced into some forklift upgrade. While some competitors may see it that way, I'd tend to think most would be smart enough to realize that new hardware doesn't always signal the end of the old hardware. Typically older hardware still has some life in it, and vendors tend to allow their customers to renew support on older hardware for some period of time (otherwise, they'd have some pretty unhappy customers).

But even so, every major proxy vendor introduced new hardware in the last year without much fanfare. Blue Coat last year announced new low end platforms, the ProxySG 300 and ProxySG 600, a desktop and a 1U rack mount unit. The two new platforms now offer booting from a solid state device, for better reliability along with built in hardware SSL acceleration.

Cisco updated its high-end S-series hardware introducing a S370 and S670 platform. Both appear to be just hardware revisions of the S360 and S660 that they replace. McAfee finally took the opportunity to get off of their Dell based hardware and replace it with Intel based chassis hardware, given their recent acquisition announcement by Intel. The low end WW500 and WW1100 finally get replaced by the WG4000 and WG4500, lining up with the WG nomenclature already used by their higher-end siblings.

Even Websense introduced a new V5000 and new V10000, dubbing them the V5000 G2 and V10000 G2. No major differences in the specs were discernable, so either a cost reduction or simply update to currently available hardware.

So here's to new hardware across the board. Too bad we didn't get a bigger news splash from the vendors themselves.