Crossbeam C25 (running CheckPoint VPN-1 and Secure Platform)

Score: 3.87

Editor’s note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across 10 UTM categories, please see our full coverage.

Crossbeam is one of the few dot-com companies focusing on the enterprise security market to have made it through the bad years. It is reaping the fruits of its strategy to build high-end multifunction security gateways. The C25 we tested, while it is a $24,000 piece of hardware (and that’s before you add a Check Point software license to the bill), represents the lower end of Crossbeam’s product line. The C25 has three smaller cousins, and Crossbeam also offers hardware running their own operating system instead of Check Point Secure Platform, though we did not evaluate those products..

This summary only discusses the C25 appliance. For a discussion of the Check Point firewall software running on the C25 appliance, see story about Check Point VPN-1 UTM Gateway.

Although cost is obviously a consideration, the C25 is a well-designed network appliance. Compared, for example, to a general-purpose Intel server being used for the same task, the C25 has the ports in the right place (in the front, where God intended them to be), lower component count and power consumption, and Crossbeam’s good technical support standing behind it all.

Crossbeam also qualifies multiple security applications on its hardware, which means that the C25 can be repurposed over time to run different security tools, such as Web filtering, IDS/IPS, or antispam/antivirus products.

When Check Point’s UTM-1 is running on the Crossbeam C25 under Secure Platform, from a functionality point of view, there is nothing to distinguish the C25 from any other Intel server. Crossbeam’s value comes in its hardware design, system reusability and support.