Firewall Appliance

Overview

The firewall appliance is a 1U rackmount next-generation firewall that sits at the network edge and inspects every packet crossing between zones. It combines stateful filtering, deep packet inspection, application identification, intrusion prevention, and VPN termination on a single multi-core x86 platform. Twelve front-facing interfaces (eight copper GbE and four 10G SFP+) carry traffic, while dedicated silicon offloads the expensive cryptographic and pattern-matching work so inspection throughput stays high under load. Dual hot-swap power supplies and a redundant fan wall keep it running through a single component failure, the design target for an edge device that cannot drop the link.

How it works

Traffic arrives on the Network Module. Each copper port passes through its GbE Magnetics for isolation and a multi-port Ethernet Controller / PHY that frames and classifies the packets, while the SFP+ cages take fiber or DAC uplinks. Two inline port pairs are wired through LAN-Bypass Relay devices that latch closed on power loss, so a dead box becomes a wire rather than an outage.

Packets cross into the Inspection Mainboard, where the Compute SoC Module runs the firewall data plane against session and flow-table state held in four ECC DDR4 ECC DIMM modules. Secure boot is anchored by the TPM 2.0 Module, which verifies the image in the BIOS flash before the SoC is released to run. When a flow needs encryption or signature scanning, the mainboard hands it to the Crypto Acceleration Card: its ASIC accelerates AES-GCM and public-key operations for the VPN tunnels and runs the regex engine behind the IPS rule set, returning results far faster than the general-purpose cores could. Boot firmware, configuration, and rolling logs live on the M.2 NVMe SSD M.2 drive.

Operators interact through the Front Control Panel, which drives the status LCD and console port for first-boot setup and out-of-band CLI access. Thermals are handled by the Cooling Fan Array, a front-to-back blower wall whose PWM speed tracks the SoC and ASIC temperatures, and the whole stack is fed by two load-sharing supplies in the chassis.