Tolly Group engineers found the SonicWall NSv 470 virtual firewall provided the right level of security performance for cloud workloads
SonicWall today announced a new report by The Tolly Group, which detailed the testing and analysis of the performance of the SonicWall NSv 470 virtual firewall. Using Keysight’s CyPerf cloud-native testing solution to provide the test infrastructure for standardized, repeatable performance tests, Tolly benchmarked the throughput and connection performance of the virtual firewall in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Most enterprises are moving their data centers to the cloud and moving away from traditional on-premises deployments, making it imperative for security teams to provide the same level of security and performance for cloud server instances as they have been doing for on-premises physical servers.
“Today’s enterprise solutions demand next-generation firewalls that perform well within distributed cloud network environments,” said SonicWall Executive Director of Product Marketing Kayvon Sadeghi. “Independently validating the performance and security of SonicWall’s virtual firewall is an important achievement to help organizations safely adopt secure cloud strategies. Given the speed and volume of cloud migration today, and the greater complexity of the environment, it’s never been more important to secure the assets in the cloud.”
Test Methodology and Results
Tolly engineers used three different traffic profiles to collect results: unencrypted HTTP traffic, encrypted (HTTPS/TLS) traffic and Tolly productivity traffic mix. Engineers used CyPerf’s unique capability to simulate a traffic mix from different applications – the Tolly productivity traffic mix include five applications: JIRA, Office 365, Skype, AWS S3 and Salesforce.
“Today’s disaggregated cloud environments present network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) with new challenges to validate their offerings,” said Ram Periakaruppan, vice president and general manager of Keysight’s Network Test and Security Solutions group. “Understanding how firewalls behave in these new cloud environments is a key challenge. SonicWall is at the forefront of publicly demonstrating the performance and security of their next generation virtual firewall.”
The tests were run against three different security profiles:
- Firewall – Basic firewall functions with no policy set.
- IPS – Firewall with the intrusion prevention system feature enabled.
- Threat Prevention – Firewall with IPS, antivirus, anti-spyware and application control features enabled.
The table below highlights a sampling of results observed in the AWS public cloud environment. For complete results and test parameters, please download the report here.
| Test | Unencrypted HTTP Traffic | Encrypted HTTPS/TLS Traffic |
| Firewall Throughput | 7.70 Gbps | 3.10 Gbps |
| IPS Throughput | 7.60 Gbps | 3.05 Gbps |
| Threat Prevention | 7.40 Gbps | 3.04 Gbps |
Table 1: Test measurements for NSv 470 in AWS Cloud
“Using Keysight’s CyPerf cloud-native testing solution and SonicWall’s next-generation virtual firewall we easily configured a test environment in minutes for standardized and repeatable performance tests in AWS,” said Kevin Tolly, founder and CEO of the Tolly Group. “With cybercriminal activity and cloud adoption increasing exponentially, cloud firewalls have become increasingly important, as they thwart attackers from gaining unauthorized access to applications, data, workloads and more.”
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