Unleash Power: Cisco Firewall 4200 Series with AMD Processor

AMD-Powered Cisco Firewall 4200 Series

Data breaches are an unwelcome fact that come with the continuing expansion and significance of data centers, necessitating the development of increasingly robust security measures. With its new Secure Firewall 4200 Series, which offers great performance, robust scalability, and a plethora of cutting-edge capabilities to both major organizations and data center service providers, Cisco has raised the bar in terms of data security.

There is a long history of cooperation between AMD and Cisco, which began with the very successful and well-received 3100 Series of earlier Cisco Secure Firewalls. With the release of its most recent Secure Firewall 4200 Series, Cisco has incorporated new features made possible by the potent, dynamic combination of Versal Adaptive SoCs and AMD EPYC Embedded 7003 CPUs.

The Secure Firewall 4200 Series had its debut at Cisco Live in Las Vegas on June 4–8, 2023, and it will have its Melbourne debut on December 5–8, 2023, at Cisco Live.

Cisco claims that the Secure Firewall 4200 Series, which comes in a small, space-saving single rack unit form factor, supports a broad range of network interfaces and offers double the throughput of the company’s previous-generation firewall. With its high port density and tuned for maximum flexibility and scalability, the new Firewall 4200 Series can expand massively. It can also cluster up to 16 firewall devices together to function as a single, powerful firewall that is administered as a single unit.

There are three distinct models that provide flexible deployment choices and outstanding threat protection for a variety of use cases. All models may be implemented in both firewall and specialized intrusion prevention system (IPS) modes. A single Firewall 4200 Series firewall with application visibility and control (AVC) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) features may provide 65–140 Gbps of throughput, depending on the model. It can examine more than 1.5 Tbps of traffic when it is extended to a 16-node cluster. The 4200 Series can handle up to two 802.1Q headers in a packet and supports Q-in-Q (stacked VLAN) for inline sets and passive interfaces.

Nazmul Rajib, senior product marketing manager at Cisco Systems, Inc., said, “We are proud of our close collaboration with AMD for Cisco’s newest Secure Firewall 4200 Series that deliver cutting-edge performance in critical ‘always on’ secure environments using AMD EPYC Embedded 7003 processors.” “With AMD EPYC processors and Versal Adaptive SoCs, Cisco has created a hardware root-of-trust protection and leadership platform security, enabling Cisco to create a world-class firewall designed to protect the most critical information in enterprise data centers of all sizes.”

AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors provide up to four terabytes of memory capacity in addition to substantial compute density and performance-per-watt scaling. This memory capacity offers the ultra-low latency and compute agility required to quickly detect and prioritize security threats. Extra-large caches up to 256MB per CPU further improve data access.

It is now possible to effectively use up to 64 cores per CPU thanks to all of this. The AMD EPYC 7003 series CPUs push the limits of efficiently accessing numerous accelerators, high-speed storage, and network interface cards with 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4 (up to 160 in 2P configuration). Two hardware threads, or logical CPU cores, are provided by each of the 64 CPU cores. Up to 128 or 256 logical CPU cores may power the single-socket and dual-socket setups, respectively.

The processing power of AMD EPYC Embedded 7003 Series processors, which can handle demanding workloads, “always on” networking, and computing needs with enterprise-grade dependability, helps to free up bottlenecks.

Throughput* : Throughput is tested using the intrusion prevention system (IPS), application visibility and control (AVC), firewall, and Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software, all while analyzing 1024B of traffic under optimal test circumstances. Cisco measures and provides throughput statistics.

The sophisticated Crypto-Accelerated Architecture, a crucial component of the Secure Firewall 4200 Series, is made possible by Cisco software working in concert with the inclusion of another AMD device family Versal Adaptive SoCs. The Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) of the 4200 Series, which enables administrators to view into encrypted network traffic without decryption, is powered by these flexible and scalable SoCs.

The architecture offers deeper real-time insight into encrypted traffic while accelerating IPsec decryption and transport layer security. The encrypted visibility engine may be turned on to prevent encrypted threats without needing to be decrypted when privacy is a concern. By doing this, a security administrator may prevent the network from going black by learning which client or client application is currently operating.

The following are some extra features of the Secure Firewall 4200 Series:

• Supporting 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G, 100G, and 200G interfaces, dual network modules
• Malware analysis and event storage are handled by two solid-state disks.
• Uptime and resilience are guaranteed via dual management interfaces.
• Fail-to-wire network modules improve fault tolerance and dependability.

Authorized Cisco resellers are now selling the Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series.