The NSsp series is designed for large enterprises, university campuses, government agencies, managed service providers, and data center operators that need firewall throughput from 47 Gbps to 105 Gbps. It handles environments with tens of thousands of concurrent users, high-density 25G and 100G switching infrastructure, and East-West traffic inspection demands that exceed what the NSa series can provide.

All three models share the same 2U chassis, SonicOS 7 platform, and 100,000-user SSO capacity. The NSsp 11700 delivers 47 Gbps firewall throughput and 17 million DPI connections. The NSsp 13700 steps up to 60 Gbps throughput and 22 million DPI connections. The NSsp 15700 tops the line with 105 Gbps throughput, 40 million DPI connections, and a different port configuration (6x100GbE QSFP28 and 4x40GbE QSFP+) suited for carrier-grade and data center core deployments.

The NSa series is a 1U platform covering mid-size to large enterprise environments with throughput from 5 Gbps to 55 Gbps. The NSsp series is a 2U platform built for very large enterprise and service provider environments, starting at 47 Gbps and reaching 105 Gbps. The NSsp also offers higher VLAN interface counts (1,024 vs 512 on the NSa), larger DPI connection tables, more storage, and 100G interface options not available on any NSa model.

Yes. All NSsp models support active-passive high availability with stateful session failover. Active-active clustering for load-balanced throughput is also supported. High availability requires a second licensed NSsp unit of the same model. Firewalls.com can quote HA pairs and assist with initial configuration and failover testing as part of our professional services.

The NSsp 15700 runs SonicOSX 7.0, while the NSsp 11700 and 13700 run SonicOS 7.0.1. SonicOSX is SonicWall's next-generation operating system designed for the highest-performance hardware, offering improved multi-core scalability and flow-based inspection optimized for the 15700's hardware architecture. The feature sets between SonicOS 7 and SonicOSX are broadly comparable for day-to-day security policy management.

The NSsp 11700 and 13700 include two 100G interfaces, eight 25G SFP28 ports, four multi-rate 10G/5G/2.5G/1G SFP+ ports, four multi-rate 10G/5G/2.5G/1G copper ports, and sixteen 1GbE copper ports, along with two USB 3.0 ports, a console port, and a dedicated management port. The NSsp 15700 uses a different port layout with six 100GbE QSFP28, four 40GbE QSFP+, and sixteen 10GbE SFP+ ports.