SonicWall unveiled a sweeping revamp of its security line up today. Alongside a unified operating system and cloud-native management console, the company also introduced a new generation of enterprise and branch firewall appliances.

According to Dmitriy Ayrapetov, VP of platform architecture at SonicWall, the announcement represents the culmination of more than a year and a half of work and is an expansion of the company's boundless security philosophy.

The announcement today tackles two key markets for SonicWall. "One is an expansion of enterprise capabilities ... and the other is strengthening and launching a new generation of products for our [small to midsize business] and distributed enterprise portfolio," Ayrapetov explained.

The launch can be broken down into three categories: security appliances, threat analysis products, and a new operating system and management console.

"We're basically bringing the scalability and ease of use of SonicWall to the enterprise," he said.

At the heart of the announcement is SonicOSX 7.0 and the newly rebuilt SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM) 2.0. The new operating system is built on a unified code base, on which all SonicWall appliances and virtual firewalls will now run.

"The UI language that you see in this new operating system is something that's going to be also in the rest of our product line," Ayrapetov said.

While this is nothing new for SonicWall's hardware, the same operating system will also power the security vendor's virtual firewalls.

SonicWall's second-generation NSM has also received a complete overhaul.

Functionally, Ayrapetov explained, SonicWall's Network Security Management platform hasn't changed all that much. Customers can still perform zero-touch deployments, apply templates, and automate topologies.

However, under the hood, the management system has been completely rewritten on a cloud-native backbone. This, Ayrapetov said, enables SonicWall to scale to thousands of devices per tenant rather than getting hung up on a couple hundred. "So, similar capabilities just ratcheted up to 11," he said.

Along with the new operating system and cloud-native management platform, SonicWall is also introducing support for multi-instance multi-tenancy.

"We've effectively containerized the functionality of our firewall," he said. "There are a number of benefits to enterprises and [managed security service providers] and telcos because this gives them complete tenant isolation."

This means service providers can support different versions of the code for different clients in order to support different models or use cases. "You can reboot independently, you can run different configurations, which is not something that's traditionally possible with multi-tenancy," Ayrapetov adds.

SonicWall also released several new security appliances, including the enterprise-focused NSsp 15700 and two new SMB-focused TZ-series firewalls.

The NSsp 157700 boasts multiple 100 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s, and 10 Gb/s interfaces, compute cluster-like processing, and is aimed squarely at large enterprises, governments, data centers, and service providers.

Meanwhile, SonicWall claims its latest generation of TZ-series firewalls are the first desktop appliances to offer multi-gigabit interfaces for connectivity with SonicWall switches.

More importantly, the TZ570 and TZ670 offer three times higher performance than the previous range of TZ firewalls, said Ayrapetov.

All three firewalls support the latest generation of encryption including TLS 1.3.

Finally, SonicWall is wrapping its cloud-based sandboxing service into an on-premises appliance designed for highly regulated enterprise.

"We've seen, over the past four years, customers, especially in the enterprise, who are in highly-regulated industries: oil, gas, financial, healthcare, international customers, military, government. They want to retain ownership of their files, they want to make sure their files don't leave the network, don't leave the country."

The new appliance enables customers that can't leverage a cloud-based service due to data governance restrictions to benefit from greater visibility and threat detection.