Un-Delled SonicWall beefs up firewall to wrestle ransomware

SonicWall has updated its product range with an eye on ransomware and mesh networking. The privately owned network security vendor last week released six security products and services designed to accelerate speed thresholds across wired, wireless and mobile networks. In particular, the portfolio will include a high speed …

[Anonymous Coward]

It used to be a good company with a good product 15 years ago

but then it got into treating it's customers as tenants paying perpetual rental rather than a once-off purchase.

[rtjones]

Re: It used to be a good company with a good product 15 years ago

Actually, we have a sonicwall at a remote site... no subscriptions turned on. The base firewall product is still a 1 time purchase like it was 15 years ago. It still is VLAN capable and does QOS, point to point VPN, and SSLVPN. If you want all the security bells and whistles beyond being just an IP firewall, then you have to add whatever security subscriptions you think you need.

I can't think of an enterprise firewall / utm that doesn't charge for subscriptions (other than home /community versions like Sophos/Astaro, PFSense, and the freebies in Untangle).

[Nate Amsden]

Re: It used to be a good company with a good product 15 years ago

Sonicwall customer for about 5 or 6 yrs now mainly for site to site vpn but recently deployed in combo l2 l3 bridge mode for inline firewalls.

They work well. My biggest complaints are doesn't support SNI for server SSL and for SSL inspection for servers requires termination on the appliance which I'm not willing to do. Fortunately these units are site to site vpn only so impact is minimal.

Have had one bug open on my 3500s where i have to reboot them every few weeks due to something in 5.9.1 hopefully will get that fixed soon. Before 5.9.1 on those units they were solid for 5 years straight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It used to be a good company with a good product 15 years ago

Having used sonicwall and other vendors over the years I have to agree that they are not what they were...first experience was a pro2040 - worked like a charm...replaced with an NSA 2600 and have already had the unit die (under warranty), and the @#^&$^ logging sucks...unless you set up a syslog server, it won't even log valid connections - and trying to track down stuff that is dropped/killed is a minefield. Half the time I need to put the logs into debug mode - track down the issues - and then put it back out of debug mode as they fill up completely...packet tracing is helpful, but it still doesn't make logging valid connections - and who is doing what nay easier....

[Lysenko]

Well at least they have a sense of humour...

The NSA 2650 firewall enables threat prevention....

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't read ATP since...

at least 2013... seemed to be the buzz word back then. Disappointing they didn't throw in 'machine learning' somewhere. Would've made the FireWall sound like it was released this year.

[Jeffrey Nonken]

Sorry, I gave up on them when Dell bought them. Granted I was using an older model for my home network, and it's obsolete now, but adding "Dell owned" did not fill me with confidence. Also they instantly dropped all remaining support for my model like a hot rock.

[Mahhn]

Congratulations

Congratulations on being free from dell!! I had worked for Equalogic for a while, dell just buys companies to rape them of a couple assets, treats the stepchild companies like dirt until they are done beading them out. I saw some amazingly bad business practices while there by Dell. In my current position we removed dell products and services when rebuilding the data center we finished last year. 13mil, none went to Dell :) I will never recommend them, people are people, but as a company - they have no respect.