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Clear Choice Test Unified Threat Management Firewalls. All-in-one firewalls show spotty performance: Juniper, Cisco, Check Point lead the way in test of 13 unified threat management devices.
Intro to UTM Testing Testing categories Product Summaries Click tabs to expand

Testing All-in-one Firewalls

Joel Snyder examines 13 Unified Threat Management (UTM) products for performance, manageability, power consumption and more.
By Joel Snyder , Network World , 11/12/2007

Are there unified threat management (UTM) firewalls with the chops to provide the perimeter security functions that an enterprise needs? After all, enterprises generally employ best-of-breed security products, not the all-in-one devices popular with the small and medium business set. In this test of 13 enterprise UTM products Network World Lab Alliance member Joel Snyder puts these products through their paces in eight categories. Overall, he finds that good enterprise firewalls are plentiful, but adding in UTM features like intrusion prevention and anti-virus scanning will yield very spotty performance. The overall top performers in this test are Juniper, Cisco and Check Point.

Intro to UTM Testing

These links provide direct access to our underlying reasoning for testing this class of products as well as a detailed methodology on how we tested them. You'll also find here a summary of how each of the 13 products tested faired across the 10 categories assess and get some insight into the things we couldn't actually prove (but still need to be considered) within the confines of this testing project.

Testing categories

Network World Lab Alliance member Joel Snyder assessed each of the 13 UTM products in ten categories. Here is a category by category breakdown of the results.

Product Summaries

These links provide a product-by-product breakdown of the all-in-one firewall wares tested by Lab Alliance member Joel Snyder.

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E-Class NSA E7500 Review just got postedBy Anonymous on April 7, 2008, 3:27 pmHi, The review for the E-Class appliance from SonicWALL just got posted: http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2008/040708-sonicwall-utm-gigabit-test.html?page=1

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UTM for SOHOBy Anonymous on March 10, 2008, 9:25 pmGreat article - best I've seen so far on UTM. I'm considering replacing a home office router with a low-end UTM appliance with IPS as an added layer of security...

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Fortinet EnterpriseBy Anonymous on December 23, 2007, 7:33 pmI agree with all the comments about deoploying av at the edge of the Enterprise. But more importantly, I gave up selling Fortinet since their new channel team has...

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Cost is largely irrelevant when we write testsBy Joel Snyder on December 1, 2007, 4:47 pmWell, the short answer to your question is: "The e-Series didn't exist." In fact, I just got some of the new boxes into the lab a few days ago, and I believe that...

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Testing should be from units comparable in price.By Anonymous on November 29, 2007, 8:37 pmWhy was the one of the E-class appliances from SonicWALL tested? I don't think a comparison between a product of half the costs of the Juniper is very fair. Especially...

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