* SonicWall SSL-VPN 200 and SSL-VPN 2000 out in Q3
SonicWall is coming out with SSL VPN gear later this year for small and midsize businesses at prices it hopes will be a big draw.
The two devices the company will have available in the third quarter of this year are called the SSL-VPN 200 and the SSL-VPN 2000.
While some might say it’s pretty late to get into the SSL game, given the recent mergers and acquisitions among SSL vendors, SonicWall may be in a good position because it is already established as a security vendor and because it isn’t trying to compete for the largest customers. The latter keeps it out of the sights of the biggest competitors such as F5, Aventail, Cisco, Juniper and Nortel.
The 200 is a desktop appliance with five 10/100 Ethernet ports and the 2000 is a rack-mounted device with four ports. The company hasn’t set prices for them yet, but expects the range for the 200 to be somewhere between $500 and $1,500 and between $1,500 and $5,000 for the 2000.
These prices put it in a category with the relatively young SSL vendor enKoo, whose philosophy has been to sell pared back SSL gear that is inexpensive enough for small organizations. Like enKoo, SonicWall doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles such as software to check that computers trying to establish SSL connections to a SonicWall box meet security policies. But that may be OK with the small businesses that SonicWall is targeting, as they may not be aware of the capabilities of higher end SSL VPN equipment.
SonicWall says it will have fewer tiers of license packages, so they can go from a license for, say, five users to a license for unlimited users with fewer steps in between. The limit of concurrent users will be set by limitations of the hardware, but the company says it hasn’t tested for those limits yet. SonicWall says it expects the 200 to support about 20 concurrent users and the 2000 to support about 200. Low-end users will want to take a look at these devices.
