It takes understanding applications, and networking people don't understand that very well, so the special sauce comes in when you want to exert control and you have to be in the data forwarding path. The hard part is lending all this sophistication and packet analysis while not slowing down the process.

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An inline deployment is crucial because of performance. Both the decision about how to treat traffic and the forwarding of enforced traffic is faster. If you're going to sit inline, you'd better be LAN speed. So, in our case, our custom hardware is the key to maintaining 10-gig speeds.

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