We tested the Check Point UTM-1 firewall in our lab network by putting it through a series of tests designed to reproduce what a security manager would do when managing firewall appliance installation, backups, restores, changing of IP addresses and other management tasks.

An early beta unit that we initially starting testing for this article had issues with performance: It did not include the same amount of memory that the shipping version we eventually benchmarked. The situation turned out to be fortuitous, as we were then able to test the units' disaster-recovery measures.

Fortunately, we were able to save and restore all our policy settings, though we did run into some rough spots discussed in the test article. We also used the UTM-1 as a firewall with Point's SmartDashboard.

We did not test the firewall, because we were concentrating on what elements the new appliance hardware and the UTM-1 appliance-management system brought to the table rather than capabilities of the longstanding VPN-1 applications,  which we have tested in the past, running on the appliance.