To meet the growing need for security and networking convergence, Versa Networks today announced the launch of new SASE gateways delivering over 100 Gbps throughput.

The new gateways aim to address the challenges organizations face in converging networking and security functions into a unified SASE platform. Versa's new gateways combine high-performance hardware with the company's Versa Operating System (VOS) software to hit the 100 Gbps throughput milestone. According to the company, the increased throughput enables various compute-intensive networking and security capabilities like SD-WAN, firewall and NGFW to be run together without compromising user experience or network performance.

Versa has certified two new hardware options: the Versa CSG5000 and Dell PowerEdge R7515 - to power its VOS software at over 100 Gbps throughput.

“Prior to launching the new CSG5000 series appliance, our top end gateway was the CSG2500 series appliance, which has been benchmarked to deliver 50+ Gbps throughput for WAN routing, stateful firewall processing, and SD-WAN direct Internet access (DIA),” Nikhil Desai, senior director, product management at Versa Network, told SDxCentral. “In comparison, we have benchmarked the CSG5000 series appliance to deliver 120 Gbps throughput for routing and stateful firewall, and 100 Gbps for SD-WAN DIA.”

Desai said that Versa worked with leading processor and system on chip (SoC) vendors to put together CSG5000 and Dell R7515 appliances. He added that the Versa CSG5000 and Dell R7515 carry the latest high-end processors and hardware offload technologies to maximize performance and scale.

On the network interface side Versa CSG5000 units come preloaded with 16 ports that can support either 10 or 25 Gigabit per second Ethernet, paired with an additional 4 ports that support 100 Gbps Ethernet interfaces.

The system integrates an Intel x86 CPU and also integrates a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip as well as cryptography acceleration capabilities to help boost security performance.

At the foundation of Versa Networks' unified SASE approach is VOS.

VOS integrates switching, carrier-grade routing, SD-WAN, firewall, and intrusion detection into a unified approach. VOS also enables acceleration of computationally intensive processes like encryption/decryption and deep Packet inspection, supporting critical security functions such as zero trust network access (ZTNA), Cloud Access Security Broker, secure web gateway (SWG), data loss prevention (DLP),Intrusion prevention/detection system (Intrusion Prevention System/IDS), anti-malware and Uniform Resource Locator filtering.

A key part of the Versa Networks approach is something the company refers to as a single pass architecture.

Desai explained that there are two core elements to the single-pass architecture:

1. One-time processing per Packet: As a Packet traverses the network, each Packet is processed only once. This means all networking and security functions are performed only once, significantly reducing processing overhead, service inconsistency and attack surface. As each Packet is processed, networking functions, decoding, policy identification, and signature matching for security threats are all performed just once.

1. Uniform engine to detect and block threats:  Instead of using separate appliances, policy engines, and software images, Versa SASE single-pass architecture consolidates all these components into a single element, streamlining network and security operations resulting in higher performance and minimized latency.

“This is just the beginning,” Desai said. “We have strategic plans to continue to expand both the scale and the functional capabilities in VOS.”