Dell takes on Cisco in the Mid-Market with new Next-Gen Firewalls

According to the Infonetics research firm, Cisco owns over one-third of the mid-market firewall business worldwide. Majority of that share is comprised of the Cisco ASA traditional stateful firewalls with a few of the models supporting addition of IPS or anti-malware modules (additional hardware, of course) for improved security. However, you can only pick one module. 

It’s time to kick security complacency out of the mid-sized business market.

Today, at Interop 2013 in Las Vegas, we are introducing the Dell SonicWALL 6th generation Network Security Appliance (NSA) Series  that bring the “inspect everything” philosophy, a prerequisite for security against modern threats, to the latest generation hardware aimed at the mid-sized businesses and distributed enterprises. This generational refresh began with the SuperMassive 9000 Next-Generation Firewall Series (NGFW) launch in February 2013.

By scaling this technology to the $4K-$20K (USD) price point, there’s little excuse for organizations between 100-1000 employees to settle for a network security appliance that can’t simultaneously do Stateful Firewall, Intrusion Prevention, Anti-Malware, SSL Decryption, Application Control, URL Filtering and Botnet prevention through a single integrated security engine with a single easy-to-use management interface. Website defacement has given way to attackers compromising and insidiously placing attack code on well-known websites leading to headlines like  “US Labor Department Website serving malware to innocent visitors” and the recent compromise of speedtest.net.  This tactic is designed to ensnare as many victims as possible, regardless of their size, location or affiliation. No business or individual connecting to the Internet should gamble the safety of their data and computer by not protecting their organization from attacks such as these. Dell’s patented Reassembly Free Deep Packet Inspection™(RFDPI) engine powered by intelligence by the Dell SonicWALL Threat Research Team can find these threats and neutralized them before they enter into the network, even if the traffic is encrypted with SSL. 

Cisco can’t touch this. Well, they might try to come close, but they’ll require four separate pieces of hardware chained serially together, with additional licensing for each piece. Busy IT admins and security directors shouldn’t settle for these types of solutions for critical infrastructure.

In addition to combining high security with high performance, the new Dell SonicWALL NSA Series makes Dell the first major security vendor to bring 10GbE connectivity to the sub $5k price point, ensuring that our customers’ infrastructure is future proof and can scale with the growth of their business. The new NSA series, comprised of the NSA 6600, NSA 5600, NSA 4600 and the NSA 3600, ranges from 24 to 6 powerful security cores, with 2 to 4 10GbE interfaces and high density mixture of copper and SFP 1GbE interfaces. This processing power is necessary to inspect all traffic for numerous types of threats at speeds up to 3Gbps – regardless of port or protocol.  Power consumption for products that run 24x7x365 is always a big concern, and the new NSA series does not disappoint on this front, consuming between 74 and 113 watts and full load, depending on the model.

Note: Click on the image below to see a larger version of the new Dell SonicWALL NSA Series:

Dell SonicWALL NSA Series firewall hardware
The new NSA series introduced by Dell Security Products today is ground breaking in the security capabilities available to mid-sized organizations and distributed enterprises, allowing enterprise grade security to be deployed in all locations. Tying those locations together, of course, is our Global Management System allowing a single pane of glass management for thousands of Dell SonicWALL firewalls, ensuring consistent policies across the enterprise and a centralized point of logging and reporting. 

This week at Interop in Las Vegas, May 7-9, we will be showcasing the new NSA Series in the Dell Security Products booth #851 and the Dell (main) booth #1127. Join the conversation in real time from the show floor at Interop via Twitter and follow the hashtags #DellSecurity, #NGFW and #Interop. Follow @Dell and @SonicWALL on Twitter for the latest updates.

About the Author: Dmitriy Ayrapetov