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Juniper Networks is cranking up the speed of its SRX5800 Services Gateway to enable service providers and large enterprises to better address the demands for greater performance and security in increasingly unpredictable networks.
Juniper officials said new hardware created for the gateway will double its available Internet Mix (IMIX) firewall to 2 terabits per second as businesses are forced to manage both the rapidly growing numbers of Internet-connected devices and the increasingly advanced threat landscape.
Organizations have a lot to balance as they deal with the changes that are going on in their networks, according to company officials. They need to have high speed and performance to ward off attacks, while at the same time making sure that any data collected about threats can be used to bolster firewall policies and enforcement points throughout the network.
“As the threat landscape continues to evolve and a variety of devices increasingly flood the network, companies are forced to not only meet network performance demands but also ensure they have efficient, fast and scalable protection in place,” Christofer Hoff, vice president and security CTO for development and innovation at Juniper, said in a statement. “With Juniper’s latest performance advancements, the company is elevating industry standards and empowering businesses to accelerate time to enforcement with the fastest available throughput on the market today.”
Cisco Systems officials are predicting that the number of Internet users will hit more than 3.6 billion by 2017, that Internet traffic will surpass the zettabyte level next year and that global IP traffic will grow threefold between 2013 and 2018. Also by that year, wired devices will account for 39 percent of Internet traffic, while WiFi and mobile devices will make up 61 percent. By 2020, there will be more than 50 billion devices worldwide connected to the Internet.
It’s against this backdrop that Web 2.0 companies and enterprises are looking to improve the security and performance of their networks. Juniper officials said the company’s next-generation firewall and portfolio of threat-protection products offer a combination of high throughput, reliability and security features, such as an intrusion-prevention system and unified threat management.
The new hardware for the SRX5800 Services Gateway—which will be available during the first half of the year—includes third-generation input/output cards (IOC3), third-generation system control boards (SCB3) and an upgraded midplane chassis.
According to Juniper officials, the combination of the technologies and the company’s Express Path software enables the services gateway to surpass 2 terabit-per-second throughput, and that each IOC3 line card supports two packet forwarding engines, a high-density configuration of 2x 100 Gigabit Ethernet and 4x 10GbE high-speed interfaces. The new hardware also delivers 240-gigabit-per-second bandwidth and twice the bandwidth increase over current hardware cards.
The IOC3 cards will come in a new SRX chassis, and also can be used in the current SRX chassis. They also can be used in mixed configurations that include IOC2 cards and service processing cards, enabling organizations to protect the investments they’ve already made, according to company officials.