The rise of hybrid workforces – comprised of employees who work flexibly in remote and onsite settings – is transforming the way we work and how staff resources are utilized to maximize their potential. But as more and more corporate data traffic traverses the open network, connecting home offices to centralized business facilities, maintaining network security is becoming increasingly challenging.
Together with AMD, Cisco is addressing these challenges head on with the recent introduction of its Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series. Featuring AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors, this new firewall series is designed to make the hybrid work model practical, secure, and efficient. This is achieved, in part, by adhering to a ‘zero trust’ security model that defaults to treating all network activity as a security breach until it’s been verified as authentic. All requests are approached as if they originated from an inherently less-secure open network, and ‘never trust, always verify’ is the guiding mantra.
SUPERIOR SECURITY FEATURES WITH AGILITY
The Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series is designed to process traffic faster and deliver up to seven times more inspection throughput than its predecessors. It can significantly enhance the video conferencing experience, while offering state-of-the-art security features – a hallmark of any hybrid work model. At the CPU layer, its advanced processing capability is essential to Snort 3 intrusion prevention system (IPS) which supports multithreaded traffic handling.
“Our new enterprise-class firewall, Secure Firewall 3100 Series, is ready to support your evolving world. Thanks to its purpose-built hardware architecture, the 3100 series firewalls can boost IPsec VPN performance up to seventeen times higher, compared to its predecessor series. Its clustering and high port density flexibility allow your firewall to grow with you, ensuring strong return on investment.” says Nazmul Rajib, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cisco Systems, Inc.
“We are very excited to work with Cisco as they bring next generation Secure Firewall 3100 series to market. Our EPYC 7002 family of high-performance and scalable processors enabled Cisco to create a uniform platform and software architecture across the Secure Firewall 3100 series,” said Surya Hotha, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group at AMD. “Our strong collaboration with Cisco accelerated time to market to address critical security demands of the evolving digital world. Our EPYC family of processors are uniquely positioned to help handle demanding security workloads with increasing performance requirements.”
Cisco’s Secure Firewall 3100 Series features enterprise-grade AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors to complement Cisco’s Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software, which is designed to excel at several critical protection and visibility capabilities. Deep packet inspection is chief among them, whereby the software analyzes traffic for malware, viruses, and intrusions at access points throughout the network – from home to office.
SCALABILITY FROM SYSTEM TO SOCKET
AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors provide Cisco’s design team with scalable CPU performance and power spanning from 12 to 64 cores, in a single socket. This in turn helped to enable Cisco to scale its Secure Firewall 3100 Series from the entry-level to the high-end to meet its customers’ varied performance and capability requirements. Available in four configurations – each housed in a dense, compact 1U form factor – Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series devices are optimized for business resiliency and exceptional threat defense across a wide range of use cases.
In addition to providing ample performance per watt scalability, AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors are equipped with the latest and fastest DDR4-3200 dual-channel memory support with up to eight channel access to up to four terabytes of memory capacity, providing the ultra-low latency and necessary compute agility to identify and prioritize security threats in seconds.
AMD EPYC™ 7002 Series processors provide up to 128 lanes of PCIe® 4.0 connectivity to reduce bottlenecks, with the processing performance to handle heavy-workload, ‘always on’ networking and computing requirements with enterprise-grade reliability.
LEADERSHIP IN NETWORKING AND SECURITY FEATURES
AMD and Cisco will be showcasing the Secure Firewall 3100 Series at the forthcoming Cisco Live event in Las Vegas (and virtual), June 12 – 16, at AMD booth #3154. Onsite at the event, we’ll be discussing how together AMD and Cisco can deliver systems designed for the most demanding modern workloads, combined with the simplicity of SaaS-managed infrastructure to optimize full-stack operations from infrastructure to cloud.
To learn more about how AMD Embedded processing solutions are enabling networking and security leaders like Cisco to innovate high performance enterprise firewall solutions, visit https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded.
