Pervasive network connectivity brings the benefits of increased productivity, profits and cost savings. It offers internal and external users access to applications and services instantaneously anytime and anywhere in the world over the network. With the great benefits of always-on network connectivity, however, comes the security threat from malicious and unauthorized users trying to cripple the network and the applications. DoS attacks are still the most common security threat to applications, and are the most difficult to defeat. Even today's advanced firewall technology may not be sufficient to protect server farms and applications from high-speed DoS attacks, and in many service provider environments, firewalls are not an option.

The Brocade intelligent ServerIron Layer 4-7 switches are industry leaders in security and performance, and meet the security needs of the most demanding organizations in the world. The switches support a wide variety of intelligent security features, and combine these security features with high-end performance to act as a reliable last-line-of-defense for the server farms in financial networks.

The SYN-Guard feature helps defeat most Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks that take advantage of the TCP connection handshake mechanisms. The switches shield "real" servers completely from any TCP connection requests until the connection is successfully completed with the three-way handshake. The Layer 4-7 switch forwards the connections to the real servers only after the connection is legitimately established. The servers never see any partially established connections, which are timed-out by the Layer 4-7 switch. SYN-Guard also avoids the use of session table for pending connections and conserves the resources to support legitimate clients.

The ServerIron security solution also features a comprehensive suite of application rate controls on the user and server side to prevent abuse and attacks using legitimate connections and application transactions. The switches act as traffic cops and limit the load from individual users and to individual servers to prevent overloading servers and slowing application performance. Highly-intelligent layer 7 inspection and filtering capabilities embedded in the ServerIron TrafficWorks OS help network and application managers prevent sensitive data and information theft while protecting against service downtime.

• At A Glance

  • Delivering eBanking Reliability and Building Consumer Trust (2 MB)

  • Improving the Collaborative Online Educational Experience (950.1 KB)

  • Increasing Ecommerce Reliability and Protecting Your Bottom Line (197.9 KB)

  • Reducing Healthcare Delivery Costs While Improving Online Service (925.6 KB)

• Data Sheets

  • Brocade ServerIron ADX Series 1000, 4000, and 10000 Switches (2.7 MB)

• Solution Briefs

  • Building High-Performance Carrier-Class DNS Services (649.6 KB)

  • Comprehensive Enterprise Security via Web, Messaging, and Gateway Best-of-Breed Solutions (631 KB)

  • Ensuring Highly Available and Scalable Data Encryption with Load Balanced Key Management (1.1 MB)

  • Scalable Solution Delivers Web Application Security with No Compromise in Performance (714.2 KB)

  • Secure, Integrated, Scalable Solutions Deliver Rich Content in Large-Scale Deployments (729.7 KB)

• Solution Guides

  • Enhancing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by Scaling Network Performance with Brocade ServerIron and Blue Coat ProxySG (1.8 MB)

• Technical Briefs

  • Transparent Cache Switching Using Brocade ServerIron and Blue Coat ProxySG (235.6 KB)