SonicWall today rolled out SD-branch functionality to its security-centric SD-WAN offering alongside a new line of multi-gigabit switches. It's part of a push by SonicWall to extend stronger management and provisioning tools to distributed enterprises and channel partners.

When customers deploy network security, wireless access, or SD-WAN, "we want them to be able to do that easily through a single pane of glass, manage everything through a single pane of glass, and roll it out with what we call zero-touch provisioning, so, complete auto-configuration," explained Dmitriy Ayrapetov, VP of platform architecture at SonicWall.

The company's new SD-branch capabilities do that by enabling customers and service providers to remotely provision and manage branch deployments from a unified control center, thus providing greater visibility and control over the network.

SD-WAN is nothing new for SonicWall. "In 2018, we rolled out SD-WAN capabilities on our firewalls as a no-charge capability," Ayrapetov said.

SonicWall, however, won't be rolling out SD-branch specific hardware. Instead, the new capabilities are designed to run on the company's existing line of security appliances.

This approach is similar to the one taken by rival security and SD-WAN vendor Fortinet, which also runs its SD-WAN software stack on its Forti-branded line of next-generation firewalls.

New Switch Hardware

Alongside the new SD-branch capabilities, SonicWall also announced seven multi-gigabit switches, which the company says will expedite deployment times.

Ayrapetov explained that previously SonicWall had relied on Dell switches — Dell owned SonicWall between 2012 and 2016 — but they couldn't be remotely provisioned or configured, requiring a much more involved installation.

The company's new switch line attempts to rectify this by enabling the switch to be automatically configured by the firewall. The switches support up to 10 Gb/s networking over small form factor pluggable ports and can either be used as a standalone switch or daisy-chained to support larger networks.

According to Ayrapetov, all of the functionality and hardware announced today are about helping enterprises and service providers increase their operational efficiency.

"It's about having one person being able to do a lot more, not having to log into multiple consoles, not having to learn new products, not having to make configurations in different vendors systems to make sure that it all works together," he said. "We do it all under the hood, reduce the cognitive load for the admin, and make it easy for one person to manage this whole infrastructure."