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    Dell Ups Next-Generation Firewall Ante

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    Dell made an effort to more firmly establish itself as a major provider of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGF) in the enterprise with the introduction today of a Dell SuperMassive 9800 firewall capable of inspecting packets at a rate of 20 Gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

    Dmitriy Ayrapetov, director of product management for Dell SonicWALL, says that as the volume of attacks many organizations face continues to rise, many existing firewalls are being overwhelmed. Most of them were neither designed to protect as many applications as organizations now routinely run or inspect packets at an application layer, where many attacks are now being launched.

    Ayrapetov says the Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection RFDPI) single-pass threat prevention engine that Dell firewalls are based on searches every element of every packet at a rate that scales to meet the application performance requirements of the modern enterprise.

    Dell today also unveiled an update to its Global Management System that makes creating reports in environments that can now span millions of connections much simpler, adds Ayrapetov.

    Priced at $55,000, Ayrapetov says Dell is making a concerted effort to make high-performance NGF capabilities available at a price point that enterprise IT organizations can actually afford.

    Dell may not always be the first vendor that comes to mind when thinking about IT security. But since its acquisition of SonicWALL, Dell has established a significant presence in a firewall category that continues to transform. In fact, rather than having to deploy two different classes of firewalls, the performance of NGFs is finally reaching a point where IT organizations can begin to think about consolidating firewalls in favor of a single platform that adds the benefit of being much simpler to manage.

    While SonicWALL has an extensive history in the firewall category, competition in the NGF space has been fairly fierce. After going private, however, it looks like Dell is now ready to take on that challenge.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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