Westcon-Comstor Southern Africa is providing reseller partners the opportunity to provide end-user customers advanced security features, at scale, following the announcement from vendor partner Palo Alto Networks that it has expanded its range of next-generation firewall devices with new hardware and virtual appliances.

The new devices include purpose-built hardware and virtual next-generation firewall appliances. Available immediately from Westcon-Comstor, these devices allow customers to safely enable applications and redefine security performance for both threat prevention and SSL decryption. This is a key component of securing a customer’s cloud journey while at the same time prevent cyberattacks across network, endpoint and cloud environments.

Each new model boasts enhancements based on the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform PAN-OS operating system version 8.0, another new addition to the company’s growing portfolio, which according to the company “includes more than 70 new features that deliver threat and credential theft prevention, secure cloud enablement, and more”.

The portfolio includes six new hardware firewall appliances that join the existing hardware family of 16 appliances designed to cater for the security needs of large data centres, small branches and remote locations, all managed centrally from Panorama network security management.

The Palo Alto Networks, VM-Series of virtualised next-generation firewall family has also been optimised and expanded with three new models. This comes as a direct response to customers who have direct requirements to expand their cloud and virtualisation.

The full range of new devices include:

  • Three new PA-5200 Series, including the PA-5260, PA-5250 and PA-5220.
  • Two new devices in the PA-800 Series with the PA-850 and PA-820.
  • The new PA-220 delivering full PAN-OS capabilities in a small desktop footprint with increased port density.
  • Three new VM-Series virtual firewall models with performance options ranging from 200 Mbps up to 16 Gbps.
  • The new VM-50, which is optimised to consume minimal resources yet delivers 200 Mbps of App-ID performance.
  • Faster VM-100, VM-200, VM-300 and VM-1000-HV have been optimised to deliver 2-4 times their previous performance with 2 Gbps and 4 Gbps of App-ID performance for hybrid cloud, segmentation and internet gateway use cases.
  • A new VM-500 and VM-700 deliver an industry-leading 8 Gbps to 16 Gbps of App-ID performance, respectively, and can be deployed as NFV security components in fully virtualised data centre and service provider environments.