Dell World is kicking off Tuesday afternoon in Austin, Texas, with a slew of security-related announcements and the launch of a new line of data center servers.

On the security front, Dell is bringing sandboxing technology to the mid-market with its SonicWALL Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Protection Service. The subscription service works the same way as larger, enterprise-grade sandboxing services from companies such as FireEye. A Dell firewall that sits at a gateway scans all of the incoming files, and when the firewall finds files that are unknown, it routes them to a sandbox in the cloud where they can be safely run and analyzed. If no malware is detected, the files are then sent on to end users.

Sandboxing is particularly effective for zero-day threats, according to John Gordineer, director of product marketing for Dell Network Security products. Zero-days are newly discovered exploits that firewalls don’t yet have anti-virus or malware signatures for. Sandboxing has become the de facto method for dealing with zero-day threats, Gordineer says, but most of the sandboxing products out there are enterprise-grade.

“What we’ve done is integrated it into our firewall,” he says. “So with the existing piece of networking security infrastructure, you add the capability to look for zero day threats, which means you can eliminate the need for the extra boxes and services.”

Also on the network security front, Dell has integrated management of its X-Series switches through its SonicWALL firewall interface. Working in conjunction with Dell switches, firewalls, and managed wireless access points, a business with multiple locations can manage its security across the entire network from a single pane of glass.

In addition to Dell SonicWALL GRID, McAfee, and Kaspersky anti-virus protection, Dell has added Cyren anti-virus to its SonicWALL Email Security signatures on its email security appliances that are running its 8.2 software release.

SonicWALL APT will be available next year, while SonicWALL Email Security is now available nationwide.

For data center security, Dell announced updates to its Dell Data Protection (DDP) roster:

All three are available in the United States and in a few other countries, Dell says.

Data Center News

Dell also announced new products and services for large-scale data centers.

  • The first Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) servers — designed for large-scale customers such as telcos and oil and gas firms — are available today.
  • In its software-defined storage portfolio, Dell announced that the next wave of its XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, which integrate compute, storage, and hypervisor resources into one platform, will be released next month.
  • The company’s Rapid Recovery service, which enables cloud recovery for customer environments, is slated for release in the fourth quarter of this year.
  • Dell also launched an Application Modernization Portfolio to help customers migrate to new data center technologies by re-hosting or re-architecting their applications.