SonicWall PRO 5060

Score: 3.38

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.

The SonicWall PRO 5060 is a 1U-high system with six 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports. At the top of the line for SonicWall’s PRO-series product offering, it shares the same software with other firewalls from SonicWall that are offered at 1/10th its price.

SonicWall has done one of the best jobs in the firewall business of scaling its offering from the small office/home office (SOHO) level up to the enterprise. As a focused competitor in the firewall business, SonicWall has spent as much time as anyone tuning and refining its product, and the smoothness shows through.

There are some annoyances in the PRO 5060 that are clearly vestiges of a SOHO ancestry. For example, while the PRO 5060 is a zone-based firewall, some ports are stubbornly bound to a particular precreated zone, and there are aspects of the UTM configuration that make sense only if you stick with these precreated zones. We spent several hours trying to make our test configuration, which called for many zones with different security profiles, fit properly into some of the terminology of the PRO 5060.