SonicWall has refreshed the hardware and firmware for its enterprise NSsp 15700 and SMB TZ570 and TZ670 firewalls, and has united their management with a common code in the new SonicOS 7.0, which also adds a modern interface.

Today, SonicWall is kicking off the refresh of its hardware products. The enhanced models include new versions of its enterprise-focused NSsp 15700 firewalls, and its SMB-oriented TZ570 and TZ670 firewalls. These represent the high end of their product families, with the lower-end products slated for refresh early in 2021.

SonicWall has a longer than average refresh cycle for the industry – something of which the company is proud.

“Customers typically want their hardware lifecycles to last for at least four or five years, so we design our hardware lifecycles for that,” said Bill Conner, SonicWall’s President and CEO. “Our secret sauce with hardware has always been to create firmware that is tightly integrated for performance. That’s what the real work is here. One of the things I set out to do when I arrived as CEO three and a half years ago was repurpose the hardware and firmware and bring it all together. These enhancements bring the hardware performance to the next generation.”

Conner outlined the highlights of the new announcements.

“They are broken into two pieces,” he said. “One, the new NSsp 15700 firewalls, is aimed at the enterprise, MSSPs, and the Government market. The other, the new TZ570 and TZ670 next-generation firewalls, are more traditional SMB. Both have new management capabilities from our SonicOS 7.0 software, particularly a tremendously re-engineered user interface and user experience.”

The new SonicWall TZ570 and TZ670 firewalls have new SD-Branch capabilities, as they are their first desktop firewall form factor to offer multi-gigabit (5/10G) interfaces for connectivity with SonicWall switches or other networking devices in SD-Branch deployments. They can connect and secure up to 1.5 million devices or users — a 900% increase in maximum connection per appliance compared to the past generation. For SSL/TLS connections, they can secure up to 30,000 concurrent connections with DPI enabled. The new TZ570 and TZ670 firewalls can also reach threat prevention speeds up to 2.5 Gbps, even with all security services on.

The new TZ models also have a new feature, the  SonicWall SonicExpress mobile app. It lets administrators easily onboard TZ firewalls within minutes with an easy 1-2-3 process for registration, connection and management.

On the enterprise side are new high-performance NSsp 15700 firewalls for large enterprises and micro-tenanted services, new NSv 270, 470 and 870 Virtual Firewalls, and a new CSa 1000 for on-prem sandboxing with patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection [RTDMI], which protects the network against code necessary to execute side-channel attacks like Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, PortSmash, Spoiler, MDS and TPM-Fail.

Both the SMB and enterprise hardware benefit from the rearchitected SonicOS 7.0 and Network Security Manager [NSM] 2.0, the latter of which has been rebuilt from the ground up as a cloud-native management platform.

“This overhaul of the management capability on top of the hardware and firmware is important for security efficacy,” Conner said. “For partners and customers, the training requirements are now on one stack of code, so the products all look the same. That is the breakthrough here, and it’s important for people who want to create one common policy and push it out.”

In addition to the increased efficiency that comes from having a single pane of glass for all the user interfaces, Conner stressed that the rearchitected user interface, which is now cloud-based, completely revolutionizes the user experience.

“The old interface was many years old, and was the same as when I arrived,” he said. “Rearchitecting it from the ground up to be in the cloud provides much more visibility and a truly point and click visual experience. It’s also now on Linux, whereas before it used to be on VxWorks, which makes it much more user friendly, and much more high performance. The fact that it is now micro-tenanted, and not just multi-tenanted is also important. Together, it means that it provides 3.5x the performance of our old product.”

Conner said that SonicWall has gotten unbelievably strong feedback from channel partners about the new UI/UX in the betas and in partner training.

“They really are excited about the UI UX and how easy and current it is,” he emphasized. “We had that old look and feel for so long. This new one is slick, and cool, and they love the performance.”

The three platforms which have been refreshed represent the high ends of both the TZ and NSsp lines.

“This is the beginning of the hardware refresh,” Conner indicated. “In the future, we will address the low ends of both, sometime early next year.”