Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

SonicWALL Unveils Line Of High-Performance Multicore, Next-Gen Firewall Appliances: Page 2 of 3

Organizations can monitor individual and overall application usage. They can also use the firewalls to enforce acceptable use policies and productivity, limiting or banning, for example, access to social networking applications and streaming video.

The concept is somewhat analogous to URL filtering for acceptable use and productivity. Application intelligence in firewalls, introduced by Palo Alto Networks, has "shifted the entire firewall market, which was in danger of becoming commoditized," says Young.

It has been a big boost for the IPS market and has produced much better IPS capabilities in firewalls. Generally, Young said, firewall appliances have a five-year lifespan, so there's about a 20 percent addressable market for next-gen purchases each year.

The 10000 series offers IPS and anti-malware detection as well as firewall capabilities. Large organizations, however, are not likely to run multiple security capabilities on single high-end boxes, Young says.

The unified threat management (UTM) market is still almost exclusively focused on SMBs and branch office deployments. SonicWALL claims 10Gbps with anti-malware enabled on the E10800.
 
An active full mesh cluster of four appliances will produce 160Gbps firewall throughput, 80 Gbps with IPS and application intelligence and 40Gbps with anti-malware. Organizations should evaluate performance in their own production environments, as each will vary based on user practices, the complexity of the mix of applications, the use of SSL and how aggressively IPS is applied.