Dell introduces SuperMassive 9800 ‘next-generation’ firewall

Dell has announced the release of the Dell SuperMassive 9800 Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and complementary management and reporting Global Management System (GMS) 8.0. The most powerful model in Dell’s SuperMassive 9000 Series, SuperMassive 9800 provides the highest-performance deep-packet inspection firewall available, allowing customers to benefit from reduced capital expenditure and reduced rack, power and cooling costs in the future. The new GMS solution offers enhanced value to both customers and partners, by making NGFW management simple and efficient, helping to ease resource consumption, reduce overall risk and adhere to compliance requirements with a new workflow automation feature.

The largest enterprises are no longer the biggest targets for malicious activity, which has forced organisations of all sizes—including government and educational institutions—to prioritise building a continual defense of their networks from a growing list of threats from new technology, new devices and new ways users work. Mid-sized organisations are finding themselves next up on hackers’ hit lists. Too often, their security strategies have employed outdated firewalls, web-filtering proxies, and intrusion prevention systems that lack the necessary context-aware, connected intelligence required to blunt today’s more advanced attacks.

According to Gartner, “Security has been a top priority (and challenge) for most midsize enterprises for the past three years. IT leaders are being forced to secure more new IT solutions with flat IT budgets.”

Staying ahead of the changing threat landscape requires data centers that are agile, scalable, manageable, cost-effective, and, most importantly, secure. To meet today’s massive data and capacity demands, the network security layer must be highly extensible to support the largest of data center bandwidth consumptions, with zero downtime.

Dell SuperMassive 9800 addresses the most complex and demanding data center operations, all at the lowest TCO
As the most powerful model in Dell’s SuperMassive 9000 Series, the SuperMassive 9800 delivers to both mid-size and enterprise organisations the same protection and performance as Dell’s flagship SuperMassive 10000 Series firewalls. It includes all the performance-enhancing capabilities, with lower operating expenses and total cost of ownership. Key benefits of SuperMassive 9800 include:
· Up to 20 Gbps of DPI performance to solve complex and demanding data centers’ increasingly massive data and capacity requirements. Provides ultra-fast parallel inspection processing for scalability to higher throughput and connectivity
· Best-in-class security with 97.9 percent security effectiveness without compromising performance. Patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection® (RFDPI) single-pass threat prevention engine searches more levels of data, every element of every packet, to identify threats while operating on a scalable foundation that grows with organisational needs
· Reduced deployment and management costs with an integrated NGFW, IPS, SSL inspection and application control platform for mid-market and enterprise organisations that require the deepest level of network security
· Industry-leading price-performance ratio, reducing power, cooling and space costs with power optimisation design that produces optimal compute performance per Watt (GbpsW) packed in a space-saving two-rack unit appliance
· Support for up to millions of simultaneous connections at near-zero latency for higher throughput, concurrent/ simultaneous TCP connections and connection per second to respond to increased user count, user device count (BYOD and IoT) and demand for network connection
· New enterprise-level capabilities and resiliency including support for IPv6, A/A clustering, SNMPv3 and Advanced Switching to organisations that previously found the cost of entry for these advanced capabilities too expensive
· Comprehensive set of sophisticated capabilities for organisations of all sizes when coupled with Dell’s SonicOS 6.2 fully integrated operating system.

GMS 8.0 simplifies management of network security
GMS 8.0 complements the SuperMassive 9800 and other Dell NGFWs by enabling organisations to easily consolidate the management of security appliances, reduce administrative and troubleshooting complexities, and govern all operational aspects of the security infrastructure – including centralised policy management and enforcement, real-time event monitoring, analytics, and reporting. GMS 8.0 also meets the firewall change-management requirements of enterprises through a new workflow automation feature that assures the correctness and compliance of policy changes by enforcing a rigorous process for configuring, comparing, validating, reviewing, and approving policies prior to deployment. Auditing and reporting of policy changes assure that the firewall meets compliance regulations. Management of network security is improved by dramatically simplify the lifecycle management of overall security environments, rather than managing on a device-by-device basis.