Dell Introduces SuperMassive 9800 Next-Generation Firewall to Bring Powerful Enterprise-Level Security to Organisations of All

Mobilk - today 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 Too often, their security strategies have employed outdated firewalls, web-filtering proxies, and intrusion prevention systems that lack the necessary context-aware, connected intelligence required to blunt today’s more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.” 1

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.

Availability:

•Dell SuperMassive 9800 will be available worldwide (except Brazil)

•GMS 8.0 will be available worldwide in early 2015

•Dell Software solutions are available through the channel

Quotes:

Patrick Sweeney, executive director, Dell Security 

“The recent disclosures of the ShellShock and HeartBleed industry-wide vulnerabilities demonstrate that organisations are literally a few well-formed packets away from infrastructure disaster, proving the need for instant and automated security scaled to meet the needs of the network. The SuperMassive 9800 provides that level of instant security on a flexible, feature-rich platform. Our SuperMassive 9000 series has helped enterprise organisations realise tremendous benefit in terms of reduced risk and increased competitive advantage through enhanced productivity, and, now, mid-sized companies can deploy the enterprise-level security solutions they need to grow with their business, at the low OPEX and TCO they require. The feature set of the SuperMassive 9800 provides the unique opportunity to leverage the security solution as a competitive advantage, boosting productivity with the assurance that their data is secure.”

Gery Pollet, CIO, Zapfi

“A high performance, low latency firewall was absolutely mission-critical for our business. Having implemented a Dell SonicWALL Next Generation firewall we are able to offer our customers a comprehensive mobile marketing solution tailored to their needs. Our requirements were far from simple, from requiring a firewall which is easily scalable, to a firewall which is easy to manage, despite the number of end points in the field, Dell SonicWALL’s SuperMassive Next-Generation Firewall was the clear winner for us. With 10 Gpbs deep packet inspection, we are able to offer efficiency without compromising security or performance. Having access to Dell’s Global Management System we are able to keep our firewall updated using Dell’s extensive database of threats and application uses. This also assists us in prioritising bandwidth denying website access and maintaining visibility and control over applications