The 100 Gbps throughput essentially doubles what was being offered last year, and allows connectivity and a large variety of security offerings to be delivered to customers as a single application.

Today, Santa Clara CA-based unified SASE [Secure Access Security edge] vendor Versa Networks  is announcing the general availability of a new line of unified SASE gateways that can deliver over 100 Gbps. It combines version 22.1 of the Versa OS [VOS] software with high performance hardware. Out of the gate, the new gateways are available on the Versa CSG5000 and the Dell PowerEdge R7515.

These are the first unified SASE solutions that scale beyond 100 Gbps, and basically doubles the transfer rate that Versa and others were able to offer a year ago.

“The reason for the increase was principally security demand,” said Dogu Narin, Head of Product Management at Versa Networks. “Today, many of our customers are asking for connectivity to be delivered to them as a unified service. Certainly, some people still want connectivity only and some only want security. But some want to do them together. so that they won’t be exposed to hacking and other forms of trouble.”

That’s why significantly increasing the Gbps was so critical.

“We have had the CS2500, which has 50-60 Gbps. So we are basically doubling that,” Narin stated.  It is necessary when you look for intensive security operations like data leakage  and more resource-intensive services. To allow your existing customers to make use of more powerful resources, you need 100 Gbps. It will allow additional security functionality to be consolidated with the networking inside the gateway to have a single application running on a single gateway.”

To make this happen, Versa has certified two new high-performance 100+ Gbps throughput appliances, the Versa CSG5000 and the Dell PowerEdge R7515.

“We have an open disaggregated strategy which lets customers choose from different options,” Narin said. “Versa and Dell have been partners for some time.” Both models provide very high performance, which include 120 Gbps of firewall throughput, 100 Gbps of SD-WAN throughput, and 40 Gbps of Next Generation Firewall [NGFW] throughput.

A key to this scaling in performance is VOS, Versa’s converged SASE software stack which has a single-pass parallel processing architecture that can be deployed in any private cloud, on any hypervisor, or on bare metal appliances. Each packet is processed only once, with consistent policies being applied across all network and security functions.

“22.1 of our Versa OS did that,” Narin indicated. “We also built in a hardware offload engine to reach these performance engines.”

A soft release of this product last year gave a good indication of where immediate demand will likely come from.

“We released this product in the middle of last year without any actual formal release.” Narin said. “Certain different types of customers have onboarded – military and defense, large financials, service providers and large enterprises – all of which are centralized  and need performance. This type of market sees is ideal as a cloud gateway high performance solution.”

The Versa CSG5000 and the Dell PowerEdge R7515 are generally available now.