Dynamic routing is the kind of feature required of any UTM firewall as a means of providing deployment flexibility.

We tested the OSPF-routing capabilities of the UTM devices in order to simulate the kind of multiple-exit network (two Internet gateways) that might be common in a large network.

However, we do need to note that dynamic routing might also be useful on the inside of a multiple-zone firewall for a growing network as it picks up new subnets around the globe. VPNs, likewise, are perfect places for dynamic routing to be used. As a large VPN grows, the burden of managing the list of networks at each point in the VPN can be high, and dynamic routing combined with VPNs can help to maintain reachability information on what networks are connected without making every single device reconfigure its VPN each time the network changes. When VPNs are combined with dynamic routing, a tight integration among firewall policy, VPN rules and dynamic routing is required.

Two vendors stood out for making dynamic routing especially easy: Juniper, in both the ISG-1000 and the SSG-520, and Nokia, in the IP290 with Nokia’s IPSO operating system and Check Point’s VPN-1 firewall. While Juniper doesn’t offer the full suite of routing capabilities available on its enterprise and carrier-class routers, the ScreenOS routing features in combination with its virtual routers within the firewall and easily manageable configurations will probably go way beyond what is needed in most UTM environments. Likewise, Nokia’s IPSO platform has long had a very strong routing base, that supports clustering and a broad range of protocols .

To stress the extended features in both Juniper and Nokia dynamic routing, we also added a Border Gateway Protocol session to our test devices and made sure that we could control the propagation of routes between OSPF and BGP.