Smart and Powerful, for Cloud Computing: Huawei Unveils the World’s First Terabit Firewall

(Shanghai, China, Sept. 6th, 2012) Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, unveiled its USG9500 series, the world’s first high-end firewall with Terabit throughput, in the Huawei Cloud Computing Conference 2012 (HCC 2012).

Huawei has more than ten years of experience in firewall technologies. Huawei firewalls have evolved from Gigabit basic firewalls to 10G and 100G firewalls with functions such as NAT, VPN, UTM, anti-DDoS, and CGN to meet the rising security requirements of enterprises. Recent years, the Huawei firewalls have witnessed a rapid business growth in product range to include low-end, mid-range, and high-end devices to meet the needs of different enterprises, including world's biggest carriers and famous companies.

The USG9500 is the high-end flagship firewall series of Huawei. USG9500 uses the new generation processor, an industry-leading multi-core processor that delivers a throughput of 40 Gbps. The USG9500 has four processors on each service card. Each service card delivers a throughput of 160 Gbps, which is the capacity of an entire high-end chassis in the industry. Huawei believes that the popular design of "processor plus hardware acceleration” can achieve high performance at a relatively low cost, but only in some scenarios. In contrast, the USG9500 use the processors to handle all services to ensure high performance in all scenarios.

The USG9500 is built on Huawei's high-end router platform. Both the backplane capacity and switching capability of the USG9500 deliver Terabit throughout. Huawei has taken the lead in launching this feature in the “MPLS & Ethernet World Congress” held in early 2011. In terms of heat dissipation, the USG9500 series adopts the advanced U-shaped airflow design to increase the heat dissipation capabilities by 100%, improving the device reliability. This heat dissipation capability supports capacity upgrade of the service card scales to Terabit level. The USG9580 is the most high-end model in the USG9500 series and provides 16 expansion slots for applying interface cards and service cards. With each service card delivering a throughput of 160 Gbps, the USG9580 can easily scale to Terabit.

With the explosive growth of the Internet traffic, the traffic volume of the data centers will be measured in Terabit in the near future. The USG9500 has taken the lead to break through the performance bottleneck and usher in a Terabit era of network security. Meanwhile, it helps protect the enterprises' legacy investments. In terms of features and performance, the USG9500 can defend against DDoS attack traffic of hundreds of Gbps or even 1Tbps and comprehensively detect application-layer DDoS attacks to protect data center services. The USG9500 can identify over 1000 types of applications. Besides, it helps the customers of the cloud computing center learn the cost of per traffic unit inbound and outbound directions so that the customers can adjust policies accordingly. Flexibility is the most significant feature of cloud computing. Each tenant can lease virtual resources according to their own service scales. The USG9500 supports security virtualization, providing various tenant-specific security functions.

The global leading analysis corporation, International Data Corporation (IDC), recently released a report analyzing China's IT security hardware market. According to the report, the Firewall/VPN hardware market share accounted for 36.7% of the overall marketing the second half of 2011, making it the biggest share in China's IT security hardware market. In 2011, the Firewall/UTM hardware market enjoyed sustainable growth, due to the sales of high performance firewall products driven by the construction of data centers nationwide. IDC predicts that the compound growth rate in the next five years will be 5.9%. According to Wang Pei, a researcher of IDC China, Huawei has maintained a leading position in China’s Firewall/UTM hardware market. The USG9500 series, a high-end Terabit firewall product with enhanced performance, is the world’s first firewall with a throughput of up to 1 Tbps, meeting both the current and future development of data centers. The USG9500 series breaks the firewall performance record with Terabit throughput, which is twice the industry-leading level. It has provided effective solutions for ever-increasing security requirements of the cloud computing centers.