How Hyperscale Works
Hyperscale systems are designed to deliver the highest availability, resiliency, and security with easy scalability. The goal of hyperscale environments is to ensure that resources are always available to meet operational and business needs, and can grow on-demand without forklift upgrades or service disruption.
This is accomplished by networking computers horizontally, making it possible to rapidly spin systems up or down as needed. In front of these servers is a load balancer that directs requests to an available system. If a system is down or overloaded, other systems can help with the load, including the ability to spin up additional compute resources when needed.
A hyperscale system helps eliminate single points of failure or bottlenecks, which requires considering both networking and security functionality. A hyperscale system may integrate a high availability (HA) firewall with a load balancer to inspect all traffic at the firewall before routing it on to a server to fill the request. Resilient, redundant firewalls with integrated load balancing ensure that corporate IT infrastructure can scale and recover from issues without compromising security.
Who Needs Hyperscale Network Security Solutions?
Hyperscale network security solutions are designed to ensure the security of an organization’s traffic and network environment while supporting extremely high availability and performance. Some of the applications where hyperscale network security may be necessary include:
- Perimeter Security: The volume of traffic entering and leaving an organization’s network may vary unexpectedly. Hyperscale security allows the infrastructure to expand or contract as needed.
- 99.999% Uptime SLAs: Service providers and data centers may have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for “5-nines” uptime. A hyperscale design provides the highest resiliency, scalability, and redundancy to help meet these goals.
- Financial: Financial institutions commonly need high-performance, reliable network connectivity. Hyperscale infrastructure meets the often competing requirements for network performance and compliance with strict financial industry regulations.
- eCommerce: eCommerce environments can have unexpected surges in traffic due to big sale offers, seasonality, or other factors. Hyperscalability may be necessary to seamlessly meet demand without negatively impacting the user experience.
- Critical Infrastructure: High availability and uptime are essential for critical infrastructure such as healthcare, utilities, communications, and government services. Hyperscale security eliminates a potential cause of outages and degraded performance.
- Huge Data Backups: Daily data center backups (including VM migrations) are a security best practice but can create massive multi-terabyte data transmissions. Hyperscale network security can rapidly scale up to meet the need of these large flows that can easily congest large networks.
Benefits of Hyperscale Network Security
Hyperscale network security is a modern approach to ensuring the scalability and resiliency of the network security architecture protecting an organization’s IT systems. Some of the top benefits of hyperscale architectures include the following:
- Dynamic Scalability with Ease: Scalability is one of the key functions of hyperscale architectures, enabling 10x – 50x scaling within a matter of minutes. This scaling is accomplished by spinning up additional load-balanced resources, enabling seamless expansion.
- Simplicity: Hyperscale network security architectures are designed to treat an array of firewalls as a single unit. This makes it possible to add capacity or upgrade systems without the need to reconfigure the firewall cluster.
- Cloud-Level Resiliency: Cloud computing offers great resiliency and availability but is not suitable for all applications. Hyperscale architectures can enable on-premises systems to achieve similar levels of resiliency without the security concerns of the public cloud.
- Cost Effectiveness: Hyperscale data centers commonly use intelligent load balancing and multiple firewalls in a cluster to achieve full resiliency. Hyperscale utilizes all of the compute resources in the cluster (vs. legacy 1+1 designs where half of all resources are in pure ‘stand-by’ mode and unutilized). Hyperscale provides maximum resiliency at a much lower cost of hardware, power/cooling, and real estate (rack space).
Hyperscale Network Security with Check Point
Organizations of all sizes require very high performance networks with maximum cyber security and resilience. Hyperscale networks and data centers are a logical solution. However, these environments will only achieve hyperscalability if the network firewalls protecting them have the same level of scalability and resilience to keep up with demand. To learn if your organization has properly addressed cyber threats and performance requirements for on-premises and cloud environments, take Check Point’s free 5-minute security assessment.
Check Point offers multiple firewall clustering solutions. For companies looking to quickly implement a high-availability firewall configuration, Check Point firewalls natively support HA clusters with up to five nodes. For these smaller network environments, Check Point offers built-in high-availability and load-sharing tools to set up a simple HA configuration today.
For organizations with more demanding environments and stricter availability and resiliency requirements, Check Point’s Quantum Maestro for hyperscale security provides the most scalable advanced network security in the industry. The Maestro system uses a hyperscale orchestrator to distribute traffic to multiple firewalls to support network throughputs up to 3 Terabits per second in a single system.
Hyperscale network security is the most effective and lowest cost way to secure data centers or very large networks. To learn more about Maestro and what it can do for your organization, request a free demo today.
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