Security appliances of all different flavors filled the exhibit floor at this week's Infosecurity show in New York City, evidence of the continuing IT trend toward moving all manner of functions to dedicated hardware devices.

While industry stalwarts such as Cisco were on hand to show off a wide array of firewall and VPN appliances, they were increasingly crowded by a slew of smaller companies and startups pushing their own devices for companies large and small.

Among the more prominent of the dedicated appliance vendors were CyberGuard and Array Networks.

Cyberguard was displaying new versions of its security appliances and announced it was broadening its line of products with two devices designed for small enterprises, the FS250 and FS500, two models for large enterprises, the KS1000 and KS1500, and a high-end model, the SL2000.

Cyberguard also announced enhancements to its underlying firewall product, with new features including PKI  certificate management, VPN acceleration and protection against denial-of-service attacks and spam.

Array Networks showed off its line of appliances, including a new device designed for the emerging domestic national security market, the Array SR (Security Reconnaissance).

Capable of performing wire-speed network traffic analysis, the Array SR captures incoming and outgoing data packets and decodes them, even reassembling entire HTML or image files for inspection. The new device will allow companies and government agencies to dynamically inspect incoming and outgoing e-mail, instant message, TCP/IP and HTTP traffic, according to Array.

The company's other hardware appliances, the Array SP (Security Proxy) and Array TM (Traffic Manager), allow small businesses and enterprises to perform a variety of functions, from securing Web applications to performing server load balancing, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) acceleration, and clustering.

For small and mid-sized enterprises, companies such as SnapGear and eSoft displayed products to securely and affordably link remote offices and protect against outside attacks.

SnapGear's SME530 VPN and firewall device starts at $349 and offers VPN throughput of about 5M bit/sec, allowing remote workers and offices to securely connect to each other. The SME550 appliances offer 10M bit/sec of throughput and sell for $499, according to SnapGear.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.