"I so look forward to the next firewall hardware upgrade cycle!"

-No One Ever

Always Give More

If I learned one thing from my firewall customers over the many years, it would be that they like to upgrade their hardware appliances as much as an average consumer likes to shop for a new car. No amount of flashy vendor marketing materials with the obligatory "industry-first" promises peppered all over can make up for this unglamorous exercise. No one enjoys forking out gobs of money and spending sleepless implementation hours every few years in exchange for a shiny new box with largely the same architecture as the old one, save for maybe a slightly faster CPU. That said, some hardware upgrades are certainly worth it.

It's been a minute since our last major hardware refresh, largely due to the future-proof architecture of all Secure Firewall appliances. Something bigger and better has been in the works for a while, but my personal preference has always been to optimize the software first and then purpose-build great hardware for it. Instead of asking you to go through the fun exercise of forklifting hardware more often, we released Secure Firewall Threat Defense 7.0 last year to do something magical. It substantially increased (and doubled in some cases!) both threat protection and VPN performance across all supported firewall appliances -including ASA5508-X from about 7 years ago -through a simple software upgrade. If I want to be anindustry-first(if notindustry-only) at something, delivering long-lasting customer value like that is definitely it.

Bundle of Power

After delivering that software performance goodness into our customers' hands, it was time to follow on with a fundamentally new hardware architecture. Something built for resilience and scale while maintaining simplicity. A beast that would stand up to the prevailing trends of pervasive traffic encryption, assume it as a performance baseline, and crush those numbers across the industry. Last but not least, a solution that is incredibly cost-effective against the competition. This is how the new mid-range Secure Firewall 3100 Series was born.

A lot of punch is packed into thisindustry-leading1 rack-unit form factor. Building on the years of architectural perfection, it continues to employ an intelligent internal switch fabric for non-blocking external network interface connectivity as well as flexible load-balancing and prioritization logic. It features an enterprise-grade x86-based CPU engine with our extensible Threat Defense software that excels at several critical protection and visibility capabilities. One is the proven-and-true deep packet inspection functionality with Snort 3, backed by the threat intelligence and sheer brainpower of Cisco Talos. It is complemented by inference-based application identification and malware classification with our recently released and completely in-house developed Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE). All the software components and customer data are hosted on self-encrypting and optionally redundant Solid-State Drives (SSD) for that extra peace of mind.

We are borrowing a page from our higher-end appliances by incorporating theindustry-firstMulti-Instance capability which provides full resource separation between individually configured firewall tenants. Same goes for the Clustering feature (anotherindustry-firstback in its day!) with a fully distributed forwarding plane across up to 8 individual 3100 Series appliances that act as a single logical unit. All this goodness is nicely wrapped into the new unified Firewall Management Center experience, eliminating one complexity after another. Then there is the pricing that should definitely make your budget approvers smile. And just when you thought that we were all out of tricks, there's just one more thing.

It's All About Encryption

The big deal about the new Secure Firewall 3100 Series architecture is the emphasis on processing encrypted traffic. The traditional industry approach has been to deploy a look-aside crypto accelerator which works in tandem with the x86 CPU to process IPsec and Transport Layer Security (TLS) traffic for both VPN and transit inspection purposes. This approach expectedly results in a tremendous performance degradation, chiefly due to that look-aside nature that requires multiple traversals of the shared system bus for each encrypted or decrypted packet. Adding insult to injury, most industry implementations also fail to accelerate TLS session establishment in the hardware; we had specifically addressed this problem years ago and proudly published Secure Firewall threat protection throughput numbers with TLS decryption in the publicly available data sheets -can I get anotherindustry-firsthere?

The key difference with the Secure Firewall 3100 Series appliances is in the brand-new custom-built Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) component in between the internal switch fabric and the x86 CPU complex. Not only does it implement a next-generation (and a patentedindustry-first!) Flow Offload engine for both lightning-fast single-flow throughput and high-performance-computing grade latency, but it also provides yet anotherindustry-firstin-path crypto acceleration capability across both IPsec and Datagram TLS (DTLS) VPN connections. Once programmed by the threat protection software, this intermediate component can decrypt and encrypt such flows in hardware without having to rely on the main system bus or consuming precious x86 CPU cycles. The raw numbers below are impressive as much as their comparison to the previous-generation Secure Firewall 2100 family, but the single-tunnel throughput with a bi-directional pair of IPsec Security Associations (SA) is mind-blowing -something trulyindustry-leadingfor any firewall appliance.

Fun Times Ahead

From fully distributed stateful scalability to isolated multi-tenancy to mind-blowing threat protection throughput and crypto acceleration performance, Secure Firewall 3100 does not disappoint with numerous (and all true!)industry-firstclaims. Building upon years of architectural perfection, it is a threat protection package that is priced right to convince almost anyone to bite the bullet and get that long-coming hardware upgrade out of the way. Whether you're a new Secure Firewall customer or a seasoned Firepower aficionado, Cisco has got your back with our unstoppable software innovation for years to come -maximizing the life of your previous hardware investment and keeping your business protected all at once.

For more information on the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, click here.

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