You might have heard about our new XG-7100 1U Netgate® Security Gateway Appliance with pfSense® software. It was mentioned in our February newsletter. For a quick synopsis, read on…

The XG-7100 1U will be the new entry point to the Netgate® rackmount appliance line up. It is positioned as the successor to the SG-4860 1U and SG-8860 1U, both of which are now in end of sale state.

It’s designed for small to medium business (SMB) buyers, or managed service providers serving SMB clients, who want the power of a pfSense stateful packet filtering firewall, LAN or WAN router, VPN Appliance, DHCP Server, DNS Server features, but also need:

  • increased bandwidth capacity relative to our desktop products
  • 1 GbE RJ-45 and 10 GbE SFP+ connectivity
  • memory expansion flexibility for memory intensive applications
  • a PCIe 3.0 expansion slot that enables the addition of an optional multi-port NIC

The XG-7100 1U is equipped with (8) 1 GbE and (2) Intel® 10 GbE interfaces (no expansion card required), and packs a punch with a quad core Intel Atom C3558 CPU including support for QuickAssist and AES-NI. It has 8 GB DDR4 RAM, and is upgradeable to 24GB. This represents a significant processor / memory upgrade relative to the previous 1U appliances - which were Intel C2000 / DDR3-based. A complete list of product specifications is available here.

Best of all, it will be priced at $999 ($1,998 for a high availability pair). We are taking pre-orders for both single and high availability appliances now for March 2018 delivery.

One last takeaway. With a nod to the future, Netgate plans to enable a software upgrade from pfSense to either SCLR or TNSR in the coming months. These new vector packet processing (VPP) based software platforms open the door for both substantially higher firewall/VPN/router performance, as well as multi-instance orchestration management. If you’ve been running PPPoE, encrypted traffic, or application traffic that uses small packets, you’ll appreciate the performance leap enabled by SCLR or TNSR. You can get a glimpse of our software product line direction here. We’ll be writing more about that soon.