SonicWALL NSA & CDP Year End Deals ...

Hey everyone. Again I have been noticeably absent from posting to my blog. I am so busy I  have to plan out every minute of the day. I am so excited about SonicWALL's year end deals I just had to make a quick post and share the details with everyone.

Near the end of the quarter I always call up my reps at SonicWALL and look for some great deals. Here is what is happening right now.

• A package including a SonicWALL NSA 3500 with one year of C0mprehensive Gateway Security Services and a free SonicWALL SSL-VPN 200 with 24 x 7 support for one year is going for about $3100.00.  Retail price on this package is about $6500.
• A package including a SonicWALL NSA 5400 with one year of Comprehensive Gateway Security Services and a free SonicWALL SSL-VPN 2000 with 24 x 7 support for one year is going for about $6100.00. Retail price on this package is about $11,400.
• A package including the new CDP 5040 backup appliance with a total of 3 Terabytes of back-up storage and one year of 24 x 7 support for about $8500.00. Retail price is about $11,900.
• A package including the new CDP 6080 backup appliance with a total of 3 Terabytes (expandable to 6 Terabytes) of back-up storage and one year of 24 x 7 support for about $9400.00. Retail price on this package is about $13,600.

All these deals go away at the end of the year. If you have some budget left and want to save a ton of money, drop me a line. I will be glad to get you one of these deals. Thanks again for reading my blog.

Technorati Tags: SonicWALL,NSA,CDP,Continuous Data Back-up,Firewall,Year-end deals,Comprehensive Gateway Security

SonicWALL NSA E-Class looks to be a big win for Willow Creek Community Church

Anyone one who knows me or reads my blog can be certain of one thing. I like SonicWALL products. The company's product line is growing and maturing so fast it is incredible. This growth charge is being lead now by the Enterprise Class firewalls or E-Class as they are known. These products are changing the landscape and have raised the bar in performance and throughput. There is not another enterprise class product on the market that can do what the E-Class firewalls do. When you consider the price, the E-Class is by far the best value for the dollar.

I have to say that working with churches is always an honor. I just completed a job for Willow Creek Community Church, a church known not just here in the United States but worldwide for it's service to Jesus Christ. Having been given the trust of a church of this size and stature in the ministry is nothing less than a true God thing. Kudos to Kurt Donnan and his team at Willow Creek for the opportunity.

The project was to replace their SonicWALL Pro 4060 which has been in service for about three years. It currently has a 45 Meg connection via a DS3 and was pretty much at its limit handling what the Willow network was throwing at it. The replacement for the Pro 4060 was to be a pair of brand new E-Class NSA 6500 Firewalls. They were to be installed in a High-Availability pair to not only upgrade the capability at the head end of the network but to also add a layer of redundancy as the previous install was a single point of failure for the network.

Now, as anyone who has cut over the gear connecting a big network to the Internet knows, this can be a nightmare for the users if the project is not well thought out and carefully executed. Down time is never really acceptable and can ultimately create a black eye for the IT department of any network. This was no different at Willow Creek. Fortunately, SonicWALL made this process much easier by allowing the content rules and programming of the Pro 4060  to be importable into the new E-Class. I was not about to take for granted that this would work smoothly so Kurt, myself, and his team all diligently reviewed every rule, process, and custom bit of configuration that was imported to the E-Class device. When done the only thing we found is that some orphaned firewall rules that really should have not been in place on the Pro 4060 were successfully cleaned up and purged from our new configuration. That was the first sign things were really headed in the right direction. We went ahead and shut down the Pro 4060 and lit up the E-Class box to the production network. The outbound connections all came up with no issues at all. As we audited inbound traffic we noticed that connections were not being made. My suspicion was that some NIC's were not happy about the hardware change in real time and mid-stream. I simply rebooted the E-Class gear and the servers that were not communicating. Every single connection came online and worked flawlessly. Total time from Pro 4060 shutdown to E-Class NSA 6500 assuming all network functionality was less than 10 minutes. For the end uses at Willow Creek the change was totally transparent. The quote was "It can't be that easy. This was the easiest cut-over we have ever done." I really can't take the credit here. Kudos to SonicWALL and the engineers that developed the NSA E-Class products. They are simply awesome!

Post conversion I thought we should test the new install performance. The inbound connection is 45 MB over a DS3 so we should have been able to get the E-Class to show us some real use with the network in production. Here is a snapshot of the E-Class on a Monday just after conversion with podcasts, credit cards, browsing, email, downloads, and everything else going on.

Can you say yawn? Only 2 CPUs were in process! To be fair it was later in the day but we  still thought there would be more load then that. This was with all the UTM (Unified Threat Management) turned on. To just push the issues we decided to max out the DS3 with 7 simultaneous downloads of Vista SP1, several video streams, -t pings to outside servers, etc. The graph of the DS3 showed it right at the top of its inbound limit. Below is the graph of the E-Class CPU graph.

We managed to get 5 CPUs engaged. CPU 2 actually got to 41% for a brief second but I could not snap the photo quickly enough. When we ran this test we had already installed the second E-Class for a High Availability fail-over. We pulled the plug on unit one and the only thing we lost on all the stuff that was running was one ping at about 30 ms.

The E-Class boxes are a great product. If you have a Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, Watchguard, or any other firewall solution or are looking to make a change, contact Willow Creek and see what they think. I think they will tell you to give the E-Class some serious consideration. In the ministry space as well as any other market there is no other product that can come close to providing top value for the ever shrinking IT dollar.

 

Technorati Tags: E-Class,NSA 6500,Firewalls,SonicWALL,NSA,Willow Creek,Unified Threat Management,UTM,Ministry IT,upgrades

Back again from a long break ...SonicWALL Peak Performance a real win!

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!

Technorati Tags: SonicWALL,UTM,Unified Threat Management,CDP,Continuous Data Protection,Email Security,E-Class,Enterprise Neworking,Wireless,SSL-VPN,Aventail,Las Vegas,Peak Performance 2008,Venetian,Palazzo,Juniper,Cisco,Barracuda