Cavium Networks (News - Alert), a provider of semiconductor products for networking, communications, and the digital home, announced that network security provider Palo Alto Networks is utilizing Cavium Networks OCTEON II network processors for its next-generation firewall product series.

OCTEON II CN68XX incorporates 32 powerful 64-bit cores and unique hardware accelerators to enable industry-leading firewall application performance, company officials said. Their performance ranges from 1 Gbps to 40 Gbps in a single chip.

Palo Alto (News - Alert) Networks delivers next-generation firewalls that provide policy-based visibility and control over applications, users and threats. The company is using Cavium products to increase the firewall performance.

Palo Alto Networks handles application visibility, application control and threat prevention using three unique identification technologies: App-ID, User-ID, and Content-ID. These technologies allow organizations to deploy next-generation firewalls and enable the secure use of new applications while managing the inherent risks.

The Single Pass Parallel Processing (SP3) Architecture from Palo Alto delivers fine-grained policy management and enforcement capabilities at low latency, multi-gigabit performance.

Cavium’s OCTEON processors have already been deployed in Palo Alto Networks’ award-winning product lines, including the PA-4000 series. These firewall scans identify and filter traffic by user, instead of just by computer IP address, so enterprises can create granular, business-relevant security policies and safely control applications, instead of the block-or-nothing approach offered by traditional port-blocking firewalls.

“Palo Alto Networks is already delivering a new class of next-generation firewalls enabling the ability see and control applications, users and content -- not just ports, IP addresses and packets -- at up to 20 Gbps today,” said Nir Zuk, founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks, in a statement.

“We believe Cavium's OCTEON II processor family provides unmatched performance and best-in-class hardware acceleration needed to achieve Palo Alto Networks' market-leading performance and features,” Zuk added.

Recently Cavium Networks announced that in OEM benchmarks, OCTEON II CN6880 provides the industry's highest performance across many networking, security, deep packet inspection (DPI) and compute intensive solutions based on their own real customer applications.