zag Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We are just about to move away from SEGFL broadband onto our own dedicated line. The firewall used to be managed centrally. So BT have told me their router does not do NAT and we will need to purchase a dedicated firewall. Can anyone recommend one?
nicholab Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 (edited) Firebrick if you want a UK product FireBrick - For Firewalls, Bonding ADSL, Routers, Traffic Shaping... Or http://www.vyatta.com/ Edited April 4, 2012 by nicholab
glennda Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We use Smoothwall's advanced firewall along with Filtering - been brilliant so far! 1
plexer Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 Another vote for Smoothwall been running their firewall for year and they do appliance versions too. Ben 1
Soulfish Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 Plenty of suggestions Palo Alto or Juniper depending on budgets and requirements. Used the Juniper SRX240 a few times very successfully, and currently looking at the Palo-Alto PA-4020 in a clustered config for a new connection Fortigate is another one to look at (and can work out very cost effective), but the GUI/CLI isn't for everyone. Finally Watchguard is popular in the SMB segment. I'm not a fan, but know plenty of people that like them! Are you looking for a UTM/Next-Gen firewall appliance with av scanning/IPS/Application identification or just a basic firewall? And what speed is your new connection? 10mb? 100mb? 1gbit? With some more detail can recommend specific products that would fit well
MatthewL Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We use Watchguard, cannot fault them but alot of people on here also recommend Smoothwall.
zag Posted April 4, 2012 Author Posted April 4, 2012 Its a 100mbit connection. 500 users a day. I want a simple firewall basically, that's why its so confusing. Don't care about VPN, email, wireless or web filtering. Already got all that in place. The watchgaurds look like they have a nice web interface but its a confusing area. Who are the market leaders?
glennda Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 Smoothwall can do just the standard Firewall - the rest is add ons - its fairly straight forward to configure 2
sidewinder Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We have Watchguards here too. Nice and simple to configure the firewall - setting up web filtering/spam filtering etc is a bit of a faff although the price for them makes up for it somewhat
Soulfish Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 Gartner have just published their 2012 UTM report (Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management) and then there's the Enterprise Firewall 2011 report (Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls). Take what's in those with a bit of a pinch of salt (you need money to get into those reports), but essentially your looking at the normal names - Cisco and Juniper both being pretty big with Fortinet and Palo-Alto having strong positions (Juniper, Fortinet and Palo-Alto all stem from the same set of people buying/selling/creating companies ). How much do you have to spend? If your sure you only want firewall and will never want AV scanning or IPS or any other additional services then a Cisco ASA5505 or Juniper SRX100 or Fortigate-40C would all work. If you start looking at other services then you'll need to move to a bigger box to get full 100Mbps performance, but for purely firewalling those will all work and be in the £300 range without support/install costs.
dwhyte85 Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 WG are very easy to setup, so are ASA though Horses for courses and prices
zag Posted April 4, 2012 Author Posted April 4, 2012 Smoothwall can do just the standard Firewall - the rest is add ons - its fairly straight forward to configure Thanks, just gave them a call. Don't they price on clients though? Could be expensive for us.
zag Posted April 4, 2012 Author Posted April 4, 2012 I'm also looking at this WatchGuard XTM 5 Series 505 WG505031 | Insight UK Looks awesome too
Soulfish Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 I'm also looking at this [ATTACH=CONFIG]13518[/ATTACH] WatchGuard XTM 5 Series 505 WG505031 | Insight UK Looks awesome too If you only want 100Mbps firewalling the XTM21 is cheaper . The watchguards do look good though
sidewinder Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 I'm also looking at this [ATTACH=CONFIG]13518[/ATTACH] WatchGuard XTM 5 Series 505 WG505031 | Insight UK Looks awesome too That's the model we have at our 2 bigger sites - been rock solid since I installed them last year, no complaints
gshaw Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 (edited) Having spent weeks looking at these recently... - Endian... roll your own server open-source product with a nice feature list but have to pay if you want support - TMG... cheap on EES but quite limited (and runs on Windows, which is enough to make me say no straight away) - Smoothwall... solid firewall & quality content filtering but no next-gen app level detection - Fortigate... solid firewall, some basic app level filtering but only at a block \ allow level - Sonicwall... promise a lot, seems to be love\hate with customers if it does what it says on the tin. Dell takeover muddies the waters - Watchguard... lots of features, does app-level but I didn't like the interface and having web filtering on a separate box (couldn't get a definitive answer from Watchguard on this as someone said on here it's all integrated now? They couldn't provide any education case studies either which didn't impress me) - Palo Alto... the Audi \ BMW of firewalls... fantastic granularity, bandwidth control and reporting but you pay for the privilege In the end we forked out for the Palo as if we don't control the student wireless our bandwidth will disappear the moment we turn it on. On the other hand I want to let genuine student web traffic through at full speed so being able to control bandwidth per app and see exactly what's going on is worth the £££ if you can get it. In these days of port 80 tunneling and web services I personally think app-level is a must-have. Quick tip: if you're on EES buy Enterprise CALS and use Forefront Online Protection for Exchange for anti-spam filtering... save your bandwidth by doing it in the cloud and your monies by saving on firewall licenses Edited April 4, 2012 by gshaw
MatthewL Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We are just upgrading our estate to XTM5 devices form Watchguard as ours were at end of life and out of warranty.
RTFM Posted April 4, 2012 Posted April 4, 2012 We use a smoothwall UTM for our firewall and we have a seperate SWG for filtering
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