Palo Alto Networks Launches Its Fastest Next-Generation Firewall

Palo Alto Networks unveiled its most powerful and fastest next-generation firewall on Monday, touting throughput speeds up to 120 Gbps of core firewall functionality.

As the newest member of the Palo Alto Networks family of next-generation firewalls, the PA-7050 is ideal for deployments in data centers, Internet gateways and Internal network segments, the company said.

With next-generation firewall functions, such as full application enablement, IPS, AV and WildFire threat detection active on all traffic, the PA-7050 leverages a distributed processing architecture to provide scalable performance and provide organizations with advanced security across their networks – from the edge of the enterprise to the datacenter. 

Customers needed even more network capacity can add additional network processing cards (up to six total) to the PA-7050 chassis, the company said. Network traffic passing through the PA-7050 is automatically balanced across the network processing modules, increasing network performance without added management overhead.

“The PA-7050 allows security teams to achieve two seemingly conflicting goals,” said Lee Klarich, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Palo Alto Networks. “First, it provides state-of-the-art security at the application level and applies scans for attacks, malware, and exploits. Second, because it has a unique single-pass architecture designed to optimize performance, the PA-7050 can provide all of this security capability at speeds much greater than alternatives in the market; this ensures business processes run smoothly and securely for our customers.”

Available immediately, the PA-7050 runs PAN-OS, the core operating system of the Palo Alto Networks platform. Pricing for the PA-7050 starts at roughly $300,000.