Sophos has added a duo of high-speed, high-capacity models to its XGS Series of firewall appliances.
Aimed primarily at big, multi-site businesses, the new XGS 7500 and XGS 8500 are also options for many small and midsize users, according to Dan Cole, the security vendor’s vice president of product management.
“While the new Sophos Firewall XGS 7500/8500 models are optimized for larger campus deployments, they can also be a strategic resource for SMBs, depending on their business and technology needs, to power up and secure an ever-demanding infrastructure,” he says. In the age of cloud-first and work-from-home computing, Cole notes, even smaller organizations often have enterprise-grade requirements.
“These models are well-suited for the recently upgraded post-pandemic SMB network, where remote workers, SaaS access, and IoT systems are ever more present,” he says. “SMBs of this caliber require even more powerful and dependable performance with increased security coverage than ever before, and this scalable platform is going to grow with those customers’ needs.”
Both new appliances feature Xstream flow processors, the secondary network processing units Sophos has been using since 2021 to accelerate firewall performance by freeing up capacity on a device’s primary CPU. That dual chip architecture, the company says, enables the XGS 7500 and 8500 to deliver up to 190 Gbps of firewall throughput, up to 141 Gbps of IPsec virtual private network throughput, and up to 24 Gbps of SSL and TLS inspection capacity.
The 2U products support as many as 58 million concurrent connections and 1.7 million new connections per second as well, according to Sophos, and offer up to two times better energy efficiency than industry averages when using IPsec VPN.
Both devices come with integrated SD-WAN functionality, dual QSFP28 ports designed to support speeds up to 100 Gbps, 12 SFP+ 10 GE Fiber ports, and dual solid-state NVMe drives. Technicians can manage them through the same Sophos Central control panel they use to administer other Sophos solutions, and offload administration and analysis if desired to the vendor’s managed detection and response service.
XGS 7500 and 8500 units are available immediately.
XGS firewalls are a core component of Sophos’ zero-trust network access (ZTNA), XDR, and SASE strategies.
Analyst Dell’Oro Group expects worldwide spending for network security in 2022 and 2023 to total some $48.8 billion, and to continue growing at “low double-digit” CAGR through 2027.
