SonicWall or WatchGuard Firewalls?

[pipman]

Hey, I'm in the market to buy a performance firewall appliance that can do at least 100Mbit throughput and is around $2000 or less.

I've been looking mostly at SonicWall Pro 3060 and WatchGuard Firebox X1000, as well as their other models too, but not sure which is a better company and performance.

Also if anyone else has a recommendation on a company and model, it would be most appreciated.

Regards,

Dan
Danworld.net

 

[RadioActiveLamb]

I am personally impressed with SonicWall hardware. It performs well, is very easy to configure, and has lots of features for filtering, access and VPN. The products are relatively inexpensive, yet reliable.

Here are the down-sides:

There's no way to block all traffic from or to an address or a group of addresses. If SonicWall would allow the user to prioritize the access rules, this would be solved. All the "deny" rules end up at the bottom of the list, so all the "allow" rules run first, no matter what.

SonicWall support is very expensive, and they will flat-out refuse to hear you, if you are not paid-up. I wanted to report a bug in their product (not seeking resolution), but my message was dismissed, since my support was not current at the time. Since I was able to fall-back on the previous firmware, this wasn't a big issue for me.

I don't have any information on the other firewall you mentioned. I'll continue to buy SonicWall products. We have a WAN by VPN in 5 locations built on SonicWall VPNs and SDSL & T1.

Jeff Lamb

 

[ErrolHolt]

I, too, have had a deep respect for SonicWALL over the years but my respect for them was deeply affected by their drastic change in their formerly decent customer service policies. Firmware updates were, until recently, provided at no cost to SonicWALL's customers. Now, however, you must pay for an annual service contract to obtain bug fixes to SonicWALL firmare updates. SonicWALL claims that these updates are product "ENHANCEMENTS" but they often are nothing more than corrections to flaws reported by their customers.