Smart Firewall (Sonicwall TZ 170)

Member Name: amartin13

Product:	Sonicwall TZ 170
Date:	13/06/06 (933 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast setup, great protection, Feature Rich interface

Disadvantages: number of variations, NAT behind other firewalls/routers

The TZ170 is an excellent little device, it is set up in minutes out of the box and is ready to protect your network with very little configuration; much of the configuration you do have to do is wizard based anyway.

The features available to you will depend very much on the variation of this product you buy, my experience of this device lies with the Sonicwall TZ170 SP 25 Node Enhanced OS Version.

I have put two of these devices in place as a VPN gateway between two offices for up to 20 users where is has proved very stable and reliable.

The Load Balancing Features are very good, allowing you to use two broadband connections for double the bandwidth, or configure one of the connections as a fail-back should one of your ISP's experience problems, there is also the option for a modem dial-up connection as a fail-back should both of your internet connections go down - this would obviously be very slow but would at least allow network users to get onto the internet or establish a VPN to another office.

If you are looking at this device for it's load balancing ability then you could do a lot worse, but you should first of all consider a few points.

The load balancing features are only available if you have the "Enhanced OS" Version - they simply are not enabled in the Standard OS version; better to know now, than find out the hard way like I did.
Unfortunately the VPN tunnels you create will not work with load balancing, they will work with failback, so you can use one broadband connection, or the other, but not both at the same time, there are work-arounds which in my case involved a second device.

So... what about the firewall? Quite simply I can't fault it, it seems to protect the network very well, and the log files show very detailed reports of network activity. There is a very intuitive interface which allows all the port blocking/forwarding functions you would want (which aren't already dealt with out of the box) and a number of paid for software upgrades available from Sonicwall to add features such as internet content filtering and intrusion prevention.

In conclusion
For under £500 - this device will make an excellent edition to a personal, small , or medium size network looking for internet load balancing or a comprehensive VPN solution.

Summary: Very good Price:Performance:feature ratio and well worth consideration.

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