St. Bernard Software has announced the availability of its newest Web filter appliance designed to address the challenges of bandwidth growth by enabling administrators to better manage Internet traffic without compromising performance. The 500h is the latest to join the award-winning iPrism product family and integrates high-performance Web content filtering and security with enterprise-class bandwidth throughput across all protocols and ports in a fully self-contained appliance without adding discernable latency or switching complexity, and does not require caching or any off-box software.

Today's IT administrators face an ever-more complex set of challenges as the role of the Internet filtering evolves from a security-focused function to a more critical business requirement. More and more organizations are relying on new business applications that employ technologies such as social networking and streaming media to support business initiatives, yet these sites and applications often dominate network traffic and eradicate performance. Customers must be able to meet these bandwidth demands by purchasing solutions that won't slow them down.

Developed in response to customer demand, the powerful iPrism 500h appliance is the pinnacle of St. Bernard's suite of Web filtering solutions. The family of iPrism solutions is engineered with custom hardware and proprietary technology, and is proven to deliver best-in-class performance, security and flexibility, with the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in the industry.

"We estimate our bandwidth is growing 20 to 30 percent each year, which is largely due to the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, and other streaming media sites that can drain bandwidth considerably," said David Rotman, Associate VP of Technology and Chief Information Officer at Cedarville University. "Between students and faculty, we have at least 3800 users on our network, a majority of whom are online almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We chose the iPrism 500h because it delivers the power and capacity we need to meet our ongoing bandwidth demands while allowing our users to benefit from their Internet use without affecting network performance."

The 500h boasts Intel's powerful Westmere quad-core Xeon 5677 3.47GHz processor. This is a dual socket system providing customers a total of eight cores. It also offers enterprise features like dual power supply, RAID, and serviceable replacement drives in a 2U chassis.

"We asked our customers for input on their IT security pain points," said Ron Kaplan, Director of Product Management, at St. Bernard. "An overwhelming number indicated that bandwidth requirements are increasing at a phenomenal rate, as business practices become even more dependent on the Internet. The new iPrism 500h not only provides them with the same secure iPrism solution, but also enables them to meet and scale to their current and future bandwidth needs."

The iPrism 500h is available immediately and is sold as a network appliance along with a supporting subscription service that features upgrades, technical support and hardware maintenance. Pricing for the iPrism 500h starts at $24,999.