Introduction

This Administration Guide describes the following Check Point products that are based on the Scalable Platform technology:

Note - For configuration of Software Blades, refer to the applicable Administration Guides in sk181127 - Check Point Quantum R82 Release.

What is a Scalable Platform?

Scalable Platform tightly integrates the compute, storage, security, and virtualization layers into a single solution. Scalable Platform design allows architecture to scale as needed to meet increased demand by provisioning additional resources on demand to existing systems. Scalable Platform environments offer full high availability, intelligent load balancing, and support for orchestration.

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.

How a Scalable Platform Works?

Scalable Platform systems are designed to deliver the highest availability, resiliency, and security with easy scalability. The goal of Scalable Platform 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 Scalable Platform system helps eliminate single points of failure or bottlenecks, which requires considering both networking and security functionality. A Scalable Platform system may integrate a high availability 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.

Benefits of Scalable Platform Network Security

Scalable Platform 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 Scalable Platform architectures include the following:

  • Dynamic Scalability with Ease:

    Scalability is one of the key functions of Scalable Platform 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:

    Scalable Platform 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. Scalable Platform architectures can enable on-premises systems to achieve similar levels of resiliency without the security concerns of the public cloud.

  • Cost Effectiveness:

    Scalable Platform data centers commonly use intelligent load balancing and multiple firewalls in a cluster to achieve full resiliency. Scalable Platform utilizes all of the compute resources in the cluster (vs. legacy 1+1 designs where half of all resources are in pure "standby" mode and not utilized). Scalable Platform provides maximum resiliency at a much lower cost of hardware, power/cooling, and real estate (rack space).

Single Management Object (SMO)

You manage a Scalable Platform as one Security Gateway or one Legacy VSX Gateway object in the Check Point security management GUI client, SmartConsole.

A single IP address for the Scalable Platform for management communication and policy installation simplifies the management.

All Scalable Platform Security Group Members automatically clone all software packages, settings, and security policies from the SMO.