Arbor Networks has announced the availability of version 5.0 of Arbor Peakflow SP, the industry's leading network-wide infrastructure security and traffic-monitoring platform. The new Peakflow SP 5500 device nearly doubles the performance and scalability of the previous version. Peakflow SP now includes ATLAS-enabled fingerprint creation, alerting and mitigation; deeper visibility into the performance and security of business critical applications; and enhanced reporting capabilities that allow service providers to analyze traffic to and from peers, by markets and by geography.

More than 300 customers, including the majority of the world's service providers and many large enterprises, rely on Arbor's Peakflow SP platform for cost-effective, pervasive and intelligent visibility into network and application level traffic, as well as the ability to quickly recognize and mitigate security threats. Peakflow SP remains a strategic investment for service providers, allowing them to utilize the same solution for infrastructure visibility and security to deliver new, differentiated, revenue-generating managed services such as MPLS VPN visibility and DDoS managed security services.

"As enterprises struggle with the size and complexity of today's network security threats such as distributed denial of service attacks, they are increasingly turning to their service providers for help. The providers see this as a new revenue opportunity and are aggressively marketing clean pipes services to their enterprise customers," said Robert Ayoub, industry manager with the Frost & Sullivan North America Information and Communication Technologies Practice. "Arbor is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this trend because they enable providers to deliver these security services by leveraging existing investments in Arbor technology."

Key Enhancements to Peakflow SP 5.0

"Version 5.0 of Peakflow SP includes significant security enhancements that automate fingerprint delivery and attack mitigation, delivering enhanced visibility and protection of critical Network and Hosting services," said Dennis Brouwer, vice president, Global Network Solutions at Savvis. "Not only are these important technical capabilities, but they save time and staffing resources. In addition, we expect significant cost savings and network optimization from the improved peering analysis and reporting. The Peakflow platform continues to evolve and deliver real value for Savvis' global network."

Enhanced Threat Detection and Mitigation via ATLAS Fingerprints

Working with its service provider customers, Arbor has created the world's largest distributed darknet sensor network. This network, together with anonymized traffic data from 100+ customer networks, forms the core of the ATLAS Internet monitoring system. ATLAS data enables Arbor's security researchers to develop a globally-scoped view of malicious traffic traversing the backbone networks that form the Internet's core. With this unique vantage point, Arbor is uniquely positioned to deliver intelligence about malware, exploits, phishing and botnets. In Peakflow SP 5.0, this information is aggregated, analyzed and fed back to customers via Fingerprints, or network behavioral patterns of attacks. The combination of ATLAS data and Fingerprints provides much finer detection of threats such as botnet command and control (C&C) sites, phishing sites, worms and more. No other company has either aggregated this much real-time information about what is happening across the Internet or developed the means for fully integrated threat detection and mitigation.