Cato claims SASE speed record

An E-Prix seems a perfect and logical place to see speed records broken, but ahead of the Tokyo leg of the all-electric car racing series, secure access service edge (SASE) provider Cato Networks revealed it had no less than “shattered” a throughput record for secure access service edge (SASE) networks throughput, achieving 10 Gbps without hardware upgrades.

The ABB FIA Formula E World Championship markets itself as having the most competitive grid in motorsport, with 22 drivers fighting it out at 11 race locations around the world.

Putting its achievement into perspective, Cato said that as SASE continues its upmarket movement, higher capacity connections become essential for meeting various business needs such as bandwidth-intensive applications (cloud storage and backup, disaster recovery), hybrid clouds connecting two parts of the datacentre for inter-application processing, and large campuses.

To meet those challenges, Cato has introduced 10 Gbps throughput on a single, encrypted tunnel. The company said the doubling of performance on its Cloud Interconnect and Cato Socket platforms comes without costly hardware upgrades typical of appliance-based architectures.

As a solution, compute-intensive operations that usually degrade edge appliance performance – packet encryption/decryption, security inspection and the like – are handled by multiple single pass processing engine (Space) cores, concurrently processing real-time traffic in Cato points of presence (PoPs). Parallel network flow processing is also enabled in the socket to maximise throughput end to end.

By contrast, said Cato, SASE offerings implemented as virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud or modified web proxies remain limited to under 2 Gbps of throughput for a single tunnel. Appliance-based SASE offerings top out at just under 3Gbps. The lower throughputs force enterprises to artificially split traffic within locations across multiple tunnels from the edge appliance to the SASE PoP, something that Cato said will introduce a layer of complexity and risk.

The racing event at the Porsche Studio Ginza on 30 March was described by Cato as the perfect venue to highlight breakthrough performance. The sport is intensively data-driven, where teams rely on their IT networks to analyse data and make critical, split-second strategy decisions to achieve a winning edge. Multiple computers in the car produce 100 to 500 billion data points per event, with more than 400 gigabytes of data generated and sent back to the cloud for analysis. With 16 E-Prix this season, many in regions lacking Tokyo’s developed infrastructure, the ABB FIA Formula E Word Championship presents an incredible networking and security stress test.

Cato said it was not just the first SASE platform to compete in the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, but also to deliver SASE performance so powerful that client racer TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team could transfer all the data of an entire Formula E season in under 2.5 hours instead of 3.5 days.

In the deployment, Tokyo, Osaka and soon Sapporo formed the three PoP locations in Japan. In Tokyo, three Cato PoPs service the region; another two PoPs service Osaka. A sixth PoP is opening in Sapporo. Should users or locations lose access to any one PoP, they would immediately fail over to one of the others in Japan, providing the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team and all Cato customers with reliable access in Tokyo and across the globe.

“We’re very excited to be partnering with the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team at the 2024 Tokyo E-Prix,” said Cato Networks CEO and co-founder Shlomo Kramer. “The incredible speeds of the Gen3 race cars are only matched by the unprecedented throughput of Cato SASE Cloud. With 10 Gbps, we enable enterprises to replace their datacentre firewalls and enjoy all the benefits of a true, cloud-native SASE platform.”