New super massive firewall to protect all business sizes

Dell's SonicWALL brand has announced the release of the SuperMassive 9800 Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and a complementary management and reporting Global Management System.

It is the most powerful model in Dell SonicWALL's SuperMassive range. "It 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 company says.

Dell says the 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.

Dell says the largest enterprises are no longer the biggest targets for malicious activity, forcing organisations of all sizes - including government and educational institutions - to prioritise building a continual defence 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 Too often, their security strategies have employed outdated firewalls, web-filtering proxies, and intrusion prevention systems that lack the necessary context-aware, connected intelligence required to blunt today's more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.

Dell says that in order to keep ahead of the changing threat landscape will require data centers that are agile, scalable, manageable, cost-effective, and 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".

The company says the SuperMassive 9800 delivers to both mid-size and enterprise organisations the same protection and performance as Dell's flagship SuperMassive 10000 Series firewalls. Dell says the protection includes all the performance-enhancing capabilities, with lower operating expenses and total cost of ownership.

Dell says the GMS 8.0 will simplify management of network security, 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.

Availability:

- Dell SuperMassive 9800 will be available worldwide shortly- GMS 8.0 will be available worldwide in early 2015- Dell SonicWALL products are distributed in New Zealand by Connector Systems