When will R82 be available on Spark?

[info-overload]

When will R82 be available on Spark?

[Amir_Ayalon]

Hi

EA for Pro Appliances (1535/1555/1575/1595 - and up) will start soon.

please contact us if you want to participate

Hodaya Hovesh - hodayah@checkpoint.com

Amir Ayalon -  amiray@checkpoint.com

[Steffen_Appel]

Will 1530/1550 be supported later?

[G_W_Albrecht]

No, they will stay with R81.10.xx firmware - For 15x0 models, End of Engineering Support is Jan-2028, End of Support is Jan-2030.

[info-overload]

1900 being installed at the moment. Want R82.

[G_W_Albrecht]

Why R82 - which feature do you need that is not in R81.x ?

[info-overload]

I had a look at the whats new R82 release notes and there is heaps of good things.

[info-overload]

I see the release map sk152052.

Is it possible for Spark and non Spark to release at the same time or very soon after? I understand Spark is getting harmonised with non Spark.

[PhoneBoy]

There are some fairly significant differences in the hardware between Quantum Spark appliances (embedded system with an ARM CPU) versus Quantum Force appliances (server-class system with Intel CPU).
Unless that changes, I don't see us synchronizing the timeframes between releases for the two platforms.
It's not something I've seen any discussions on for sure.

Having said that, we are looking at harmonizing the functionality between the two releases.

[G_W_Albrecht]

Not possible - Spark has a very small footprint, see the specs, and is targeted at SMBs. GAiA runs on hardware supporting larger companies up to very large deployments with MDS, Maestro a.o. for ISPs and telecom providers. So harmonizing Spark is a wrong term - you can e.g. implement Cloud-Based services like TE on SMBs, but some features will never be supported; see https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk178604 for limitations, especially what is missing for both locally and centrally managed SMBs:

- Content Awareness 
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Blade 
- HTTP/HTTPS proxy 
- Suspicious Activity Monitoring (SAM) Rules
- TLS 1.3
- RADIUS Accounting
- Mobile Access Web Portal
- Traditional VPN Mode
- Secure Configuration Verification (SCV) and Desktop policy
- Machine certificate authentication
- Autonomous Threat Prevention
- Threat Extraction Blade
- Monitoring Blade
- ClusterXL Load Sharing mode
- VRRP cluster
- MTA for Threat Emulation
- IPS Packet Capture
- Anti-Virus archive scanning
- IP Helper
- Anti-ARP spoofing
- 802.1w RSTP (Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol)

[info-overload]

Well... the 1900/2000 seem to have a lot more CPU and RAM than 1800 and below as per your table History of SMB Specs and Performance - Check Point CheckMates

Surely some of these could start to be added to the 1900+

[G_W_Albrecht]

Yes, the 1900/2000 have more CPU and RAM than 1800 as they are intented for a higher number of users and more network traffic.

If you need R82 buy a GAiA SMS + GW.