SonicWALL Releases All-In-On Security Appliance For SMBs

SonicWALL has unveiled a new integrated security appliance offering small business and branch office networks affordable protection from viruses, worms and Trojans while providing firewall and virtual private network (VPN) features.

At $389, the TZ 150, is the lowest-cost product in SonicWALL's TZ appliance range, but it shares a considerable amount of its pricier siblings' security functionality. Its firewall provides deep packet inspection, while the gateway anti-virus and intrusion-prevention feature blocks viruses, software vulnerabilities and other malicious code. The appliance includes support for hardware-accelerated IPSec VPN support, enabling secure connectivity to remote networks.

"There is no such thing as a small-business virus," SonicWALL president and CEO Matthew Medeiros said in a statement. "A two-person operation is just as exposed as a large organization to attacks from gateway traffic, yet until today protection was beyond many small firms' price range or IT capabilities. The TZ 150 delivers the latest integrated anti-virus and VPN features and is highly affordable, very easy to use, and ideal for small businesses with limited access to IT support."

Designed to be easily inserted into an existing network, the TZ 150 is equipped with a single auto-MDIX Ethernet WAN port and a four-port auto-MDIX LAN switch to safely connect multiple devices to the network. The appliance is managed through SonicWALL's wizard-based Global Management System which provides a simplified configuration and installation.

The TZ 150's support for multiple network address translation (NAT) modes obviates the need to maintain multiple external IP addresses. The appliance also features Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS), allowing it to maintain access to servers with dynamically-allocated IP addresses. SonicWALL claims that this can significantly reduce the cost of hosting e-mail servers, Web servers and site-to-site VPN by allowing the use of dynamic IP addresses.