Other vendors are also on the NGFW regimen. McAfee considers the changes it made last June to its Enterprise Firewall v. 8 upgrade to have made it a NGFW.

"We re-worked the application engine so we could detect and fully inspect over 1,000 applications," says Greg Brown, McAfee director of product marketing, network defense. "We made the engine extensible, and there are application updates each week."

McAfee Enterprise Firewall v. 8 reaches 10Gbps. But to head into higher speeds, McAfee partnered with Crossbeam Systems to be able to reach 40Gbps on their platform. McAfee is working to get higher speeds on its own appliances.

And does the do-it-all know-it-all firewall really have an IPS function as effective as a standalone IPS? Brown acknowledges that it's hard to know, and that no independent tests for this have been done, but "the intention is to do as effective a job as a standalone IPS."

In comparison to a "conventional firewall" that mainly looks at IP network ranges, says Brown, the NGFW way of doing things in application control does represent a new technology for most customers.