Security was front and center at last week's Networld + Interop show in Las Vegas, with vendors including Cisco Systems and Enterasys Networks using the show to introduce new intrusion detection wares.

Cisco unveiled two new IDS appliances, the Cisco IDS 4250 and 4235. Both products combine signature-based intrusion detection capabilities with newer anomaly detection techniques, enabling them to detect both known and some unknown forms of attacks.

The 4250, priced from $25,000, can scale to handle speeds of up to 1G bps over both copper and fiber cable. The 4235 is for lower-end requirements, supporting speeds of up to 200M bps. It is priced from $12,500.

Enterasys, one of the companies formed out of the former Cabletron Systems, announced version 6.0 of its Dragon IDS. The Dragon line consists of Host Sensor and Network Sensor IDS software, a Policy Manager and the new Security Information Manager (SIM), a management station where all event data is collected and analyzed.

In addition to incorporating data from the Dragon sensors, SIM can collect and correlate data coming from firewalls, Web servers and vulnerability scanners.

Other improvements include a peformance boost of at least 50% for the Dragon 6 Network Sensor, enabling it to monitor higher-speed lines. Enterasys also announced new appliance versions of the sensor. The FE50 is for branch offices while the FE200 is for regional deployments, with capacity of about 10M and 200M bps, respectively. The GE500 is for large data centers, supporting throughout of about 500M bps.

Previously the Network Sensor could handle traffic at a maximum of about 300M bps, says Chris Petersen, product marketing manager at Enterasys. Improvements in the company's analysis will enable increases of 50% to 100% over that figure, he says. Enterasys gives each of its products a rating estimating its performance in real-world situations.

"For instance, our GE500 gigabit appliance is rated at 500M bps but may actually outperform this under certain network conditions," Petersen says.

The appliances range in price from $7,500 to $22,000. Network Sensor software can also be bought separately, for $3,000 to $15,000, depending on the speed supported. Host Sensor software ranges from $650 to $2,000 and the Policy Manager costs $2,500. That price includes the SIM.