It sports two 10Gbps Ethernet connections to the switch backplane, and future capabilities include virtualization, scalability, other form factors, and closer coupling with the switch management and forwarding plane, HP says.

The modules runs (security and network access), (Web security, filtering and IPS), (unified communications), F5 Networks (application delivery control and load balancing), Riverbed (WAN optimization), and others. The zl module can only run one application per module, but two modules can run in one 8200 or 5400 switch chassis.

"It provides best-of-breed options for the customer -- if you look at the list of partners, it's a Who's Who of those markets,"  says Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group. "On the downside, Cisco's able to integrate a lot of the capabilities together. Cisco gets a little bit of an advantage there because they can use the feedback from one [application] to modify another, etc."

The City College of San Francisco is using the zl module to run a network monitoring application from HP partner InMon Corp.

"InMon's Traffic Sentinel on the module handled all the sFlow reporting we threw at it with lower CPU utilization rates than our production server," says Glen Van Lehn, network engineer at the college. "A real-time query like 'list TCP:25 [e-mail] connections for past week made by any station where destination isn't our e-mail server' identifies possible virus infected stations. The module's drive capacity allowed me to collect 90 days of traffic data. The integrated USB port powered an external drive to back up the data. It worked well."