Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that its USG9500 series data center firewall received the 2012 PilotHouse Award presented by leading research and consulting firm Nemertes. According to the research by Nemertes, Huawei’s data center firewall outperformed all similar products in the Market Challenger category in areas including technology, service and customer benefits. In addition, Huawei ranked number one in the Strength of Technology category due to the data center firewall’s outstanding performance in functionality, reliability and strength.

The PilotHouse Award is presented annually by Nemertes to the best performing vendor of the year, based on primary research through in-depth interviews with IT decision-makers who rate their vendors based on experiences with them. Over the years, the award has gained recognition and is considered an important reference source by CIOs and CTOs in making IT purchase decisions. Specifically, the Nemertes PilotHouse award for data-center firewall recognizes firewall solutions designed to protect and serve the special needs of data centers. The recognition by Nemertes demonstrates the business value that Huawei’s solutions bring to customers.

Robin Garei, Executive Vice President of Nemertes Research, commented very positively on Huawei, saying, ''Huawei being presented with the PilotHouse Award demonstrated the strong technical strength it possesses in the security technology field.''

Liu Shaowei, President of Huawei Enterprise Network Product Line, said: “Huawei is very excited about winning the PilotHouse Award because this reflects customers' recognition of Huawei and our products. Moving forward, our commitment remains to serve as the most innovative and optimal ICT technology partner for global enterprises. Huawei will continue to focus on customer-centric innovation and offer more high-quality ICT solutions to help customers achieve greater success.”

Huawei USG9500 series data center firewall is mainly used to provide network protection to cloud service providers, enterprise next-generation data centers, and enterprise campus networks. Based on the ''NP+ Multi-core + Distributed'' architecture, USG9500 series successfully integrates multiple industry-leading security technologies, such as NAT, VPN, IPS, anti-DDoS, and minimizes the impact of security services on CPU performance. With a distributed hardware and software design, USG9500 series integrates switching, routing, and security services into one solution to enable smooth upgrade to the Terabit level while providing carrier-class reliability and comprehensive virtualization to enterprise customers.

USG9500 series data center firewall is also able to identify thousands of services, increasing network data transparency and therefore enhancing risk control capabilities. To provide ongoing effective protection, Huawei’s database research and maintenance team is dedicated to constantly reviewing and updating the application database, with eight regular updates each month. This ensures that customers are always able to sync up with the most up-to-date database and identify security risks in a timely manner.