He notes that for customers, the unified switch/security management platform and price will be attractive. "It's going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than Cisco, and this stuff can scale," he says. "The management software is more robust. Cisco's Achilles heel is it's really hard to manage it."

Cutting out the high salaries of highly trained Cisco engineers might also draw customers interested in lower data center operations costs, he says.

The security blades fit in ProCurve 5400 edge and 8200 core switches, and come with firewall, VPN and IPS software installed. The price is US$13,000 and includes one year's support, a lifetime hardware warrantee except for the hard drive, which is warranteed for five years.

Firewall speed on the blade is 3Gbps, and the IDS/IPS is 3Gbps. The VPN clocks 300Mbps when it is running alone on the hardware, and slower if other features are turned on, ProCurve says.

Some of the , but Sanchez would not say which ones.