Dell SuperMassive 9800 NGFW Promises Enterprise Level Security

Dell expanded its next-generation firewall (NGFW) portfolio with the release of the SuperMassive 9800 and the complementary Global Management System (GMS) 8.0, the company announced on Monday. The 9800 is expected to bring—wait for it—massive improvements to its current SuperMassive 9000 lineup with the highest deep packet inspection firewall available in addition to savings in upfront capital expenditure, racking, power and cooling costs.

“Our SuperMassive 9000 series has helped enterprise organizations realize 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,” said Patrick Sweeney, executive director of Dell Security, in a statement. “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.”

One of the key differences between the SuperMassive 9800 and Dell’s previous NGFW solutions is the product’s flexibility as a firewall for both large and midsized enterprises, according to the company. The 9800 delivers up to 20Gbps of DPI performance and parallel inspection processing for scalability to higher throughput an connectivity, as well as the promise of 97.9 percent security effectiveness without compromising performance. Dell designed the solution to provide reduced deployment and management costs with an integrated NGFW, IPS, SSL inspection and application control platform so midsized organizations and large enterprises can achieve the highest possible levels of security, according to the company.

The 9800 also supports millions of simultaneous connections with near-zero latency and includes support for IPv6, A/A clustering, SNMPv3 and Advanced Switching to organizations to reduce the cost of entry, according to Dell. The solution is expected to provide additional capabilities when coupled with Dell’s SonicOS 6.0 operating system.

Dell said the included Global Management System 8.0 solution will help organizations to consolidate the management of their security appliances and reduce troubleshooting complexities while governing all aspects of the security infrastructure. The system also includes a new workflow automation feature that helps assure the correctness and compliance of policy changes through a stringent enforcing process to review and approve policies prior to deployment, according to the company. This will allow that each firewall complies with compliance regulations and works to simplify the overall lifecycle management of security environments.

The SuperMassive 9800 is available now through Dell’s channel partners. Last month, the company also announced its new PowerEdge next-generation servers, promising to give customers speed and increased storage capacity for their data centers.