SonicWALL Takes Firewalls to the Next Generation: Interop Video

How safe is your network? A number of organizations will assume that because they have a firewall in place, their network is safe from intrusions. If the network is running applications and relying on a traditional firewall, however, the network is actually at risk. 

To learn more about alternative solutions offered in the market, TMCnet’s Rich Tehrani recently talked with Dmitriy Ayrapetov, product line manager at SonicWALL at this year’s Interop (News - Alert) show. Their conversation was captured in this video. 

SonicWALL offers next generation firewalls. If you are wondering about the difference between next generation firewalls and traditional, Ayrapetov offered an explanation, “Traditional firewalls focus on ports, while next generation firewalls focus on deep packet inspection and what the traffic is by the application signatures.”

Ayrapetov also noted that DPI technologies can take a big toll on performance. One of the challenges the company faces is to deliver the capabilities needed without impacting performance. To do so, SonicWALL (News - Alert) scales: “We have a reassembly packet inspection engine and combine that with multi-core – up to 96 cores in a single appliance, and can scale even beyond that,” Ayrapetov added.

SonicWALL also uses state of the art chips, and its 96-core solution is highly energy efficient. In fact, its solution only consumes 750 watts at 100 percent utilization and caters to power consumption and cooling issues for enterprises. 

It is crucial that companies spend the money to prevent hacks and protect their network, according to Ayrapetov. Companies also need to focus on the fact that break-ins today take place through malware, which gets in through application-based attacks. IT managers must look inside the packets to see what is happening to catch the layer attacks. 

“There are general attack patterns that are similar across the board. So, we look for those patterns and stop them at the gateway,” said Ayrapetov. “Very often, the vendor may just learn about it and they are working on a patch, but we stop it at the gateway.”

SonicWALL had some exciting announcements at this year’s event. Last year they announced project SuperMassive. This year, the company is launching the products for this initiative, which are top of the line, high performance next generation firewalls.

In addition, SonicWALL is launching a WAN acceleration product, which will plug in with the SonicWALL firewalls. The main benefit for this solution is the firewall gets a chance to look at the traffic and decide if it needs to be accelerated, improving overall performance. 

Check out the video in full below to learn more about SonicWALL and what they have to offer this year.

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