Network Associates released a new hardware appliance and updated software on Tuesday that will extend the reach of that company's Sniffer network traffic management technology from remote users into data centers at the network core.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based network security company announced the new s6040 Appliance, a 4u rack-mounted device that accommodates the addition of up to four full-duplex Gigabit mounted "blades," or circuit boards, for specialized applications, according to Chris Thompson, vice president of product marketing at Network Associates.

Those expansion slots will allow s6040 customers to add functionality such as antivirus and intrusion detection as their needs change, Thompson said. In addition, the s6040 appliance comes with eight ports that, together, allow up to four separate media modules running in full duplex mode to connect to the device.

Built for deployment in network data centers or application hosting environments, the s6040 is capable of doing data capture and analysis on full-duplex Gigabit networks that have up to 75 percent of their capacity utilized, with bursts of up to 100 percent utilization, Network Associates said.

The s6040 is part of Network Associates' new 6000 line of appliances. The s6040 uses the network fault detection and reporting capabilities of the Sniffer Distributed Expert software, but is packaged for high performance network environments, he said.

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