SonicWall Whats the deal?

[vortex999]

Hey guys,

 

So we are looking at different firewall and filtering options, so far my preferred option is to use lightspeed for filtering and a Smoothwall box for the firewall.

 

However I have received a quote from SonicWall for A NSA2600 that comes in at just under £3,000 as a full UTM, this is for a physical appliance and support for 3 years. All of my competing quotes are least £10K more!?.

 

I am really skeptical of this price, why so cheap?

Is SonicWall still good now that Dell are in charge?

Are they just trying to shift old stock&technology?

I cant find any mention of Layer 7/Application filtering for this model?

 

Basically I am going to be asked why we should spend 10 times more, and i need some answers to this.

 

Thanks.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Sounds to me like you're just being offered the box and are expected to manage it yourselves. I know that when we've quoted out Sonicwall deals its usually more than that for a managed and supported service. THough far less than the other quotes you've been given!

 

is this price per year or a one off?

[FN-GM]

Sonicwall filtering is shocking! any website that is not english, it doesn't work. I would avoid at all cost!

[vortex999]

That is for a one off payment for 3 years NBD.

[vortex999]

Sonicwall filtering is shocking! any website that is not English, it doesn't work. I would avoid at all cost!

 

Thanks for this. Its not preferred at all, I just need to convince management that it is worth spending 9K more to get a system that works.

[dhicks]

So we are looking at different firewall and filtering options, so far my preferred option is to use lightspeed for filtering and a Smoothwall box for the firewall.

 

We have a Lightspeed filtering device and a SonicWall firewall, total cost for devices and 1 year support was £10,000, with the SonicWall part of that being £3,000, if I remember correctly. We have issues with the SonicWall connecting to the Lightspeed device - they refuse to connect directly, and had to be connected via a mini switch. SonicWall strikes me as being overly-complex for what we want it to do - we might have different requirements from you, of course. My plan is to replace the SonicWall at some point with a machine running Untangle or simply Debian running with iptables, I don't see the need for an expensive firewall solution if you have the Lightspeed device doing filtering already.

[AMLinington]

I'm curious why you would choose to have two products when your Smoothwall can manage both firewall and web filtering - what advantages does Lightspeed have over the Smoothwall Web Filter product that are the major draw for you?

[Cmd.exe]

I'm in a very similar scenario. I have heard similar things from independent people talking down Sonicwall filtering. I was looking at lightspeed, but the price appeared much more.

Did OP reach a conclusion? Is is so hard to find a single device to firewall and content filter? (i've been told the Lightspeed is NOT a firewall, simply a content filter).

[old_n07]

We are looking at UTM's at the moment, our current Sonicwall NSA4500 will not cope when all the extra services are enabled and slows the internet to a crawl and then randomly reboots, as a test we took off the filtering and moved it over to another device and we got our speed back and the Sonicwall is stable so we are looking at replacements.

 

We are currently looking at Smoothwall, Watchgaurd and Fortinet and we just had a quote for a Watchguard XTM 850 with a 3 year security bundle coming in at £7500 which is half the cost of a 1 year Smoothwall UTM3000, so the question is does anyone have any experience of the Watchguard platform in comparison the Smoothwall?