On certain levels, it protects our information. Luckily, I had switched to Palo Alto as our VPN solution for our users. We finished that in December of 2019, just in time for COVID to hit. We had a system that was able to support 650 to 700 users remoting into our campus through the VPN. This was a huge use case for us, as it was not intended to be the solution for COVID, but it turned out to be the solution for COVID. So, it was a great use case. Obviously, we want to protect our servers, virtual servers in the cloud, and on-prem.
We have the eighth fastest supercomputer in the world. Unfortunately, we don't get to protect that because it has so much data going through it, i.e., petabytes a day. There isn't a firewall that can keep up with it. We just created a science DMZ for that kind of stuff as well as large data movers since we do weather data for the world. We research the ocean, sky, and solar weather. We have 104 universities who work with us around the world. Therefore, we need to have data available for all of them. We need to be protected as much as we can.
We started with Palo Alto 5060, then the 3060 came in, which was the next form. We have now switched to an HA system and have four firewalls as our base: a pair of 5220s and a pair of 5250s. We have been running the different OSs from PAN-OS 8.0, 8.1, 9.0, 9.1, and then 10.1. We are about to move to 10.2. We are in the process of doing that over the next week. We like to stay on the cutting edge because they are always adding more features and security.
We have it deployed in a number of different ways. We have our four main firewalls, which have two high availability pairs. One is set primarily for users and outward-facing functions. Therefore, our DMZ servers, staff, and guest networks are on one pair of firewalls. Back behind the scenes, labs and our HR department are on a separate set of firewalls. We call them: untrust and trust. Then, we have another set of firewalls, both in our Wyoming supercomputing center and in our Boulder main campus, which runs a specific program that has a DOD contract that requires more security, so they have their own set of firewalls. We also have firewalls in Azure Cloud for our tests and production environments. I am in the process of purchasing another VM firewall to put on the AWS Cloud. The last set that we have is at our Mauna Loa Solar Observatory, where we have an HA pair of just 800s because we only have a one gig radio link down the side of the volcano to the University of Hawaii.
We have between 1,200 and 1400 staff at any given time. Essentially all of them use the solution one way or another, either to access systems or through the VPN. We also have remote users who aren't employees but instead collaborators, and they can be anywhere in the world and remote into our systems. We then have people who are doing PhD programs at universities around the world who need to get into our systems to download data sets as part of their PhD or Master's program. Thus, the solution is not limited to our employees.