Business has been crazy since I last blogged at the Mind Sharp SharePoint tanning. I keep trying set aside time each week to blog but it has been very difficult. I happen to be flying again right now and flights are a great time to catch up.
SonicWALL has just completed their Peak Performance 2008 partner event and it was a real win in my opinion. It was hosted in Las Vegas and they decided to have the event at the Venetian property. Our rooms were in the Palazzo Towers and let me tell you...the rooms were very nice! Take a look at some of the room photos. The accommodations really made time in the room an unexpected treat.
I have felt since the early days of working with SonicWALL products that SonicWALL was very committed to their craft. The acquisitions they have made the past couple of years have added a rich and diverse product line and have made it easier for me to offer a complete set of solutions to my clients. The line card now includes the following:
- SMB Firewalls with diverse and unique Unified Threat Management (UTM). The units filter at the packet payload level and remove spyware, viruses, & limited spam. They also offer website content filtering and offer a unique ability to filter known and unknown complex intrusion techniques to your internal network.
- Enterprise Class firewalls (E-Class Firewalls) with up to 16 Core CPUs for a tested WAN throughput that exceeds 1.5 Gigabits. The E-Class systems maintain that throughput with the Unified Threat Management scanning all inbound and outbound traffic. They have all the functions of the SMB firewalls but are enterprise fast and scalable to high availability pairs. There is nothing out there from any other vendor with this level of speed and function. That includes Cisco, Barracuda, & Juniper.
- E-Mail Security Software and Appliances that function as local pre-email server analyzers and proxies that are scalable to multi-devices scenarios and able to handle more then 1,000,000 messages per day. The only real limits will be in the amount of bandwidth available to the site. (E-Mail Security)
- Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Currently 4 available appliances that range from 400 GB to 1.2 TB of disk to disk real time back-up. The solutions scale from backing up servers and workstations on the LAN to capturing data from remote systems the attach via the VPN. There is integrated support to natively backup Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server Databases, & Microsoft Exchange information stores. The solution scales even further to allow offsite back-up to the SonicWALL World Wide Network or to another CDP within your own multi-site network. The new hardware to be released yet this year will have the ability to grow with replaceable disks at starting sizes that range from one to six terabytes of total back-up storage. The package also comes with ability to snapshot hardware at the Bare Metal for quick and simple restores that later this year will be hardware independent.
- SMB & Enterprise SSL-VPN is a very slick technology that simply said provides a higher level of security to networks that must have a higher level of control on who and what connects to their LAN. Rather then direct VPN connections of external hardware or remote systems to your LAN, the users are offered a web connection via a browser and will proxy what ever services you choose to make available. For the most trusted hardware there is a client based VPN that can still be used and access is given on a policy by policy basis. It is compatible with MAC and Windows and on the higher end even with Linux and Windows Mobile devices. The devices range from 10 users models to models that support over 500 uses all in the SMB space. For larger networks that need an enterprise class solution with High Availability and End Point Control, the E-Class SSL-VPN appliances scale as far as the imagination will take them. Taking the solution a step further, there is now a new tech support option called Virtual Assist. This is a technician tool that allows remote control of remote systems with no client needed. It is very similar to a Live Meeting or Web-Ex tech support solution. It scales from one to as many users as you like depending on the number of concurrent connections your technicians may need.
- Managed Wireless that is 100% centrally managed from a single GUI. The SonicWALL Sonic Point is the unique SonicWALL 802.11 radio that is controlled from the Firewall UTM appliance GUI. To set up your wireless network all you do is build the profiles via the Firewall GUI and plug them in. That's it. The solution provides guest level access and will provide multiple SSID's with different levels of security and all done over one physical set of radios. The current radios are available in A/B/G and B/G. Later this year there will also be a radio that will support B/G/N.
This is some really cool stuff. Even more exciting is that all of these lines are getting big, big feature updates that will make every single item above work better, faster, and more reliably. Some of the release dates are still to be determined so as these dates approach I will elaborate in much more detail as to what is coming. Stay Tuned !!!!
SonicWALL is a key vendor in my business and after this event it is clear that they will continue to be a key partner. Quite frankly they are going to be even more important in the evolution of what I do in the commercial, enterprise, and ministry space. Kudos again to SonicWALL and thanks for a great four days in Las Vegas!
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