Sonicwall

Consider the Fortigate line. ASIC (silicon, no moving parts) based and they can AV and anti-SPAM your mail. Plus intrusion prevention, VPN, content filtering bandwidth metering, activity monitoring, lots more. I have *deep* experience with them, and I'm a big fan.

-Russ.

We also use Fortinet and are impressed by the abilities of that device. New Management abilities in the 3.0 firmware will make the Fortinets Unmatched in UTM.

@sonicwall : simple to manage but it gets more difficult, if you use their Global Management System for all Devices (Requires a sparc/solaris or intel/windows solution with an additional MSSQL or Oracle Database)

cu Berk

I manage 6 TZ-170s with site to site VPN's between all of them and I am very pleased with the performance and ease of use of the SonicWALL products. We don't use the Gateway Antivirus, but we do use the Network antivirus feature which scans incoming mail messages. Within the last month, SonicWALL has bundled with the Antivirus, a spyware removal tool which has been very effective to date. I will be upgrading the TZ-170 farily soon at the corporate site to more robust model since we are not so much a small company anymore.

I have had a TZ-170 operating here since March 2003 without any major problems. I have it email the logs to me each day. I then drop the log into Excel and use that to see what happened over the previous 24 hours. I am seeing between

SonicWall have anti virus and spyware packages available but I have not used them so I can't say how good they are. There is also an intrusion prevention package which I am trying to find out more about.

The TZ-170 currently seems to have a problem reporting ICMP packets with type and code numbers exceeding 255. Since the ICMP headers have these as 8 bit numbers I suspect the packets are really UDP packets but haven't, as yet, got to the bottom of this issue. This may have been fixed in the later software.

They are not cheap to run if you want continued 8x5 support. You can only download software updates if you have a current annual 8x5 support contract. This may also apply if you want the anti virus and spyware packages. The price that I was offered for this equated to about 25% of the original purchase price. You can make your own mind up whether this is acceptable.

Have you seen the FortiAnalyser version 3.0? Incredible...

-Russ.

I have a 2040 and I'm extremely happy. I license their GateWay and Client based AV. I also license the Intrusion Prevention. I have never had a virus outbreak (knocking on wood). They just added SpyWare detection to the AV (for free).

The only downside is they do not offer a spam filter, but I emply an outside service which filters my spam before it hits the firewall which is nice because it reduces log entries on the firewall.