Hardware security vendor SonicWall has upgraded its multi-core network security appliance, with a ‘re-assembly free deep packet inspection’ (RFDPI) engine.

SonicWall said that this would benefit IT managers wishing to get better insight into any Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and MySpace that might be running over their networks.

SonicWall said that its new inspection engine formed part of its overall unified threat management (UTM) strategy, and was "seeking to address an increasingly complicated threat landscape.”

SonicWall product management director Jon Kuhn added, “Employees are increasingly deploying and using Web 2.0 applications such as social networks and streaming media in the workplace." He explained, "For the IT administrator, the challenge is balancing access to these applications with security. SonicWall's RFDPI 8 engine puts the control back into the hands of the administrators.”

SonicWall’s RFDPI engine can support any platform memory size and is not limited by flow size (content length/size), number of concurrent connections or numbers of network streams protected over these connections.