WatchGuard Firebox Peak X8500

Score: 3.30

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 WatchGuard Firebox Peak X8500e is a 1U device with eight built-in 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports. As the high-end of a product line with over a dozen devices, the Peak X8500e is a high-performance appliance with impressive speed and an outstanding price — the lowest total cost of any of the devices we tested.

WatchGuard has divided its product line into three broad categories, Peak, Core and Edge. The Peak products, like the X8500e we tested, bring together WatchGuard’s proxy-firewall heritage with a number of performance optimizations. Our testing shows that performance isn’t a problem for the Firebox. However, we have some reservations about putting the Peak X8500e into an enterprise setting because of missing true central management and SMB focus of some features.

For example, in our testing, we set up the SMTP proxy provided with the Peak X8500e firewall, because that should have offered the greatest security. However, we couldn’t test with the SMTP proxy, because it doesn’t properly support the 2001 version of SMTP, which all modern mail servers use. This kind of rough edge might be acceptable in an SMB environment, but no enterprise e-mail manager would put up with that kind of restriction. To work around it, you have to turn off the SMTP proxy and lose some of the value of the WatchGuard firewall.