Versa Networks launches 'industry first' Unified SASE Gateway

Versa’s new gateways combine high-performance hardware with the Versa Operating System (VOS™), Versa’s converged SASE software stack built on a single-pass architecture. The increased performance delivered by these new gateways enables organizations for the first time to consolidate many networking and security functions into a single gateway.

The Challenge of Supporting SASE Convergence

The SASE market is growing rapidly as enterprises look to support new digital requirements including accelerated cloud adoption, edge computing, increased use of collaboration tools, and a hybrid workforce. According to Dell’Oro Group’s latest SASE and SD-WAN 5-year forecast report, enterprises are anticipated to spend nearly $34B between 2022 and 2027 on single-vendor SASE solutions.

While SASE promises to deliver a unified approach to connectivity and security, these functions have historically been delivered by a fragmented set of point products running on multiple purpose-built appliances. The convergence of these multiple security and network functions into a single application running on a single gateway has been challenging from a throughput and performance perspective, forcing enterprises to make trade-offs between security and network performance/user experience.

High-Performance SASE Gateways

To meet this critical need, Versa has certified two new high-performance appliances that provide 100+ Gbps throughput – the Versa CSG5000 and the Dell PowerEdge R7515. When deployed with VOS, these appliances deliver unprecedented performance, including up to 120 Gbps of firewall throughput, 100 Gbps of SD-WAN throughput, and 40 Gbps of Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) throughput.

“Our research indicates a critical need to consolidate security and network functions to enable digital transformation at the network edge, however, without enough compute this could have a negative impact on user experience,” said Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst at industry analyst firm Tech Target’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “The performance enhancements to Versa’s Unified SASE solution eliminate performance/security trade-offs for organizations and enable a Zero Trust security model to be applied at the edge, ensuring a strong and secure user experience.”

In addition, in a real-world independent test by CyberRatings.org of eight top industry vendors, Versa CSG5000 ranked highest in Throughput, HTTPS Capacity, and Price per Protected Mbps, reflecting superior performance and security effectiveness with the lowest TCO.

Versa Operating System (VOS): Accelerating Unified SASE Performance and Scale

VOS is Versa’s converged SASE software stack built with a single-pass parallel processing architecture that can be deployed in any private cloud, on any hypervisor, or on bare-metal appliances. With these new high-performance appliances running VOS, integrated network and security functions including switching, carrier-grade routing, SD-WAN, firewall, intrusion detection, and more can be deployed anywhere. This high throughput enables acceleration of computationally intensive processes like encryption/decryption and deep packet inspection, supporting critical security functions such as ZTNA, CASB, SWG, DLP, IPS/IDS, anti-malware, and URL filtering. In addition, VOS’s single-pass architecture supports high-performance SASE by processing each packet only once and applying consistent policies across all network and security functions.

“The edge is everywhere and the legacy model of appliances and SASE services delivered in a portfolio of point products drives up cost and complexity, without meeting the compute and performance needs of today’s organizations,” said Apurva Mehta, Versa Co-Founder and CTO. “Our Unified SASE gateways offer a higher magnitude of performance than previously seen in the industry. With our scalable 100 Gbps and beyond SASE architecture, we continue to deliver the highest performance to meet organizations’ most pressing business and technical needs.”