Insights into the Advantages of Next-Generation Enterprise Networking & Security

Executive Summary

In an era of record cyberattacks that result int intrusions, ransomware, IP blackmailing, spyware, malware, hidden cryptocurrency mining injections, and DDoS, investing in secure networking equipment should top the list of needs for businesses.

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New network deployments regularly need flexibility to scale for several reasons

• To reach their employees in global offices and accommodate them when working remotely.
• Reduce risk and operational costs with a unified system.
• Customers access to their online services.
• Meeting legal compliance or insurance requirements
  

Research group Gartner reports that by 2025, 60% of organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant when deciding to conduct third-party transactions and business engagements. In relation of these trends, the global network security market is projected to grow from USD 22.60 billion in 2022 to USD 53.11 billion by 2029, exhibiting a strong CAGR of 13.0%.

Advantech is empowering businesses with a new series of leading enterprise networking platforms that feature the most advanced hardware accelerators for networking and security. Advantech’s FWA-5072, FWA-6072 and FWA-6172 high-end platforms described in this paper feature the latest 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, ensuring they can handle even the most performance demanding applications and deployments. In addition, Advantech’s commitment to software and security, with both in-band and out-of-band management solutions, redundant BIOS and firmware, and its strong ecosystem of industry-leading software partners that are now validating these next-gen platforms, altogether provide clear advantages in TCO, time to market, performance efficiency, denser networking connectivity per node, and proven solutions that meet international standards, ensuring secure access, improved system availability, and operational adaptability.

Network Security Market Trends

The network security market has seen significant growth in recent years due to the increasing frequency and severity of cyberattacks. Key trends in network security market include:

1. Cloud-focused security solutions that work between Enterprise and Cloud-based infrastructure.
2. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate threat detection within firewalls, routing equipment and data processing nodes.
3. Accommodating the rapidly growing deployment of mobile devices and IoT into the corporate network with enhanced endpoint security.
4. Working from a perspective of zero trust security that assumes every user, device and application is a potential threat.
   

Network Security Challenges and Opportunities

Network security is becoming increasingly challenging through complexity and frequency, making it difficult to stay ahead of the threat landscape. Meeting compliance and regulatory requirements can be challenging, particularly if regulations vary by country of operation, and as they continue to evolve and become more stringent. This is particularly noteworthy with legacy or fixed systems, as they are often not capable of adopting the latest security measures or are no longer supported by the manufacturer.

The latest networking platforms are taking advantage of emerging technologies to better ensure data security, such as AI, ML and dedicated security accelerators can expedite detection of erroneous elements in the corporate network, preventing or limiting damage.

The Need for High-end Platforms to Cope with Increasing Traffic and Security Threats

It’s not just the largest enterprises that require networking platforms to offer a balance of high performance and flexibility, even medium-size ventures often handle large volumes of traffic and a multitude of devices in their daily operations, their employee access, and an increasing plethora of IoT hardware installed throughout facilities. Network traffic is increasing exponentially, and security platforms need to be able to accept and analyze large volumes of traffic in real time in order to maintain an acceptable operational latency.

This requires high-end platforms to cope with traffic management and perform real-time threat analysis, while also reducing operational cost and complexity of infrastructure through hardware consolidation where possible. High-end platforms such as the Advantech FWA-5072, FWA-6072 and FWA-6172 series can achieve these aims, ultimately delivering a more resilient infrastructure, with an upgraded security posture, and with flexibility to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. To avoid system tampering, each Advantech platform features an intrusion switch that records and alarms in the event of the chassis opening. A dedicated IPMI port and platform management with Redfish, TPM 2.0 with a unique RSA key, and a secure BIOS and BMC avoids unauthorized access and updating. Advantech also ensures each firmware/software release passes security scans (ex: Nessus, NMPA, etc.) and meets international security standards (ex. NIST SP 800-193).

Benefits of 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors feature Intel’s most capable CPU cores and built-in accelerators optimized for specific workloads, such as networking, and delivers greatly increased performance at higher power efficiency for optimal total cost of ownership. Manufactured on the latest Intel 7 lithography, these processors now include up to 56 cores using the latest ‘Golden Cove’ CPU microarchitecture: featuring numerous upgrades throughout the pipeline, most notably new Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), plus new AI and security instructions. In pure CPU performance metrics, such as integer, floating point and memory access, performance improvements range from 15-47% over the previous generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable, providing a notable upgrade per processor.

Performance Benchmark

Compared to the 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors exhibit an improvement in performance ranging from 15% to 47% for workloads such as integer, floating-point, and memory bandwidth.

4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors are the first to support DDR5 technology (ECC RDIMM), with both larger memory pools and greater speeds than previous generations.

Each processor offers up to 80 lanes of PCI-Express 5.0, providing ample expansion opportunity for next-generation of add-in boards that can drive even greater throughput. The built-in accelerators achieve higher performance more efficiently than purely increasing the CPU core count; among the many now available in the new processor design, for networking applications specifically addressed in this document, the include:

Performance & Reliability Advantages of Advantech FWA-5072, FWA-6072 and FWA-6172

The Advantech FWA-5072, FWA-6072 and FWA-6172 significantly increase compute performance, memory, and networking bandwidth and offer high reliability to meet next generation, compute-intensive application needs. They are ideal for enterprise networking with focus on security, with application in NGFW, SD-WAN or vRouter, and in PoP or Cloud services. Now using a 12% smaller footprint than their predecessor, and with improved cable routing and cooling capability, the new Advantech FWA-5072, FWA-6072, and FWA-6172 designs are easier to deploy and more serviceable than ever.

Using its extensive experience in server-grade platforms, Advantech ensures reliable operation with a trusted mix of redundant hardware and hardened software.

Product Features

Depending on application requirements, between 32 (FWA-5072) to 104 CPU cores (FWA-6172) can be selected. Using a 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with 32 cores, for example, provides 20-36% faster performance versus previous generation Xeon Scalable (ref. Specrate2017), while the new 52 core processor includes 30% more CPU cores than the previous generation maximum, providing unmatched performance density.

Each CPU includes new accelerators that offer further generational improvements:

• Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) – 1.x8 faster packet processing
• Intel Quick Assist Technology – now Gen 4 up to 200Gbps
• Intel Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB) – 3.27X faster packet forwarding and 1.4X lower latency

Each platform now supports up to 4TB of memory via x16 DDR5 ECC RDIMM (8 channels, 2DPC in FWA-5072/FWA-6072, 1DPC in 6172), offering 33% more capacity and 50% more bandwidth versus the previous generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform.

Each platform is now PCI-Express 5.0 ready – 2X performance over previous generation - providing up to 200Gb/s bandwidth via each Ethernet Expansion (NMC slot) in flexible configuration options. In addition, LAN bypass and PoE are also available.

The wide scope of CPU performance, memory capacity and networking throughput can be balanced according to the specific deployment requirements (e.g. application, budget), attesting to their excellent flexibility and scalability.

Key Features: Advantech FWA-5072 (1U Single CPU Network Appliance)

The Advantech FWA-6072 features a larger 2U chassis enabling it to accommodate new 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor featuring 52 Performance cores (104 threads, 300W TDP). The larger chassis accommodates eight NMC PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, providing double the configuration flexibility and throughout of up to 1.6Tbps per unit.

Ensuring failsafe reliability it includes 1+1 redundant power supplies (800W CRPS) and three hot-swap fans, with convenient active LED indicators installed on the rear side.

Internal expansion options offer one PCI-Express 4.0 x16 now accommodating FH/HL cards, plus two 2.5-inch SATA storage bays, and two M.2 storage slots (1x NVMe SSD supported).

Accommodating two 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, giving a total of 104 CPU cores (208 threads total) for the most demanding applications and highest networking performance density available. At just 300W TDP per processor, this provides best-in-class perf-per-watt capability.

Eight Advantech NMC PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots provide configuration flexibility with up to 1.6Tbps networking throughput.

Internal expansion options include one PCI-Express 5.0 x16 double-height card (10.5-inch), or alternatively two PCI-Express 5.0 x16 FH/HL. Storage options include two hot-swap 2.5-inch SATA or NVMe drives.

Ensuring failsafe reliability, it includes 1+1 redundant power supplies (1200W CRPS) and four high-performance hot-swap fans that are conveniently rear accessible for easy exchange.

Specification Comparison

Advantech’s FWA series provides mainstream to extreme performance options for edge compute deployments, with the FWA-5072, FWA-6072 and FWA-6172 now offering greater compute density in a smaller footprint and the most advanced hardware accelerators for networking and security. They offer not just best-in-class performance, but also performance-efficiency, and flexible deployment options for a wide range of potential applications.

Leveraging 4th generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, these platforms provide a leap forward in performance in a wide number of metrics, including processing power, memory capacity and speed, expansion opportunities, and ultra-fast connectivity to upgrade throughput and security features.

Networking and security software equipment vendors can offer their solutions in confidence, thanks to robust platforms backed by industry-leading partners. Enterprises and service providers benefit from a wide choice of deployment-ready solutions so they can ‘hit the ground running’ and easily and quickly scale to meet growing business needs. Advantech’s commitment to world-class security, and extensive experience with tier-1 customers in the telecommunication and network security ecosystem, ensures customers have long-term support needed to commit to global enterprise network deployments. Software partners can leverage Advantech’s new platforms to enrich their offerings. Advantech white-box network appliances have already been proven in customer deployments to show advantages in TCO and power-efficiency, while also providing future-proof flexibility through competitive features, operational reliability, and supply, without vendor lock-in.

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