November 9, 1999 Web posted at: 9:47 a.m. EST (1447 GMT) by Deni Connor

From...

(IDG) -- Users looking to relieve network bottlenecks and eliminate firewalls as a single point of failure may find use for the load-balancing software Lucent will market with its firewalls.

Lucent next week will announce its plan to sell caching and load-balancing specialist Radware's FireProof product with its Lucent Managed Firewall. The two manufacturers are also expected to load-balance Lucent's VPN Gateway with Radware products in the near future.

The trend to load-balance firewalls started about a year ago and is picking up now, says Mark Hoover, a consultant at Acuitive in Wilmington, Del. "Load balancing started with servers and is being used more often in firewalls, which are notorious bottlenecks for data," Hoover says. "More importantly, the firewall becomes a single point of failure, which can impact electronic commerce operations or, more mundanely, e-mail services."

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Radware's FireProof is dynamic load-balancing software for firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN). It load-balances access requests among firewalls or VPNs, automatically avoiding those that are busy, overloaded or inoperative.

The Lucent Managed Firewall consists of software and management software for establishing secure connections. The firewall is certified by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and provides content security at the gateway level for Windows NT, Unix or Windows 95/98. The security management software runs on NT or Solaris. The Managed Firewall costs about $10,000.

The Lucent VPN Gateway consists of a hardware appliance commonly referred to as "the brick," IP Security client software for remote users and Lucent's Security Management Server software. Two to four Lucent Managed Firewalls can be located behind each version of FireProof.

Customers are reacting positively to the initiative.

"When architecting our site, I was looking for speed, security and zero downtime," says Jennifer Bonnett, vice president of Technology at eTour.com. "Our members rely on us to be up - when they want to surf - no matter what hour of the day or night." ETour.com is a subscriber-based service in Atlanta that receives five million hits per day.

FireProof starts at $7,500 for a two-port Ethernet version.