Sonic Wall beefs up VPN devices, lowers prices

This week, Sonic Wall is shipping upgraded versions of two of its firewall/VPN devices that have a nice feature: more for less.

The company is reworking and renumbering its PRO 200 and PRO 300 appliances, calling them the PRO 230 and PRO 330, respectively. The number changes come with added features and in the case of the PRO 330, support for more simultaneous remote users.

The price of the PRO 230 is $2,000, down from $3,000 for the PRO 200, and the PRO 330 costs $2,800, down from $4,000.

The new features include support for the advanced encryption standard encryption, support for point to point tunneling protocol for those who don’t want to use Triple-DES or AES, and the ability to limit the amount of log data that each device reports to the SonicWall Global Management System software platform. This last feature can avoid overloading administrators with data from all sites all the time.

The devices also now support VPNs through firewalls made by other vendors, so users don’t have to disrupt their current firewall deployments to use the SonicWall gear. This so-called one-arm mode enables the device to establish a VPN link through the firewall, decrypt it and send it through the firewall again for screening before the remote data is allowed into the network the firewall protects.

The new releases also offer the ability to set the amount of time between checks of whether other appliances on the VPN are still alive. Before, this dead-peer detection was done at a single preset interval. The new devices also better support Cisco VPN gear by interoperating with Cisco’s aggressive mode for connecting VPN devices. This mode increases the reliability that VPN connections will be made successfully.

With the PRO 330, SonicWall is increasing the number of remote users supported by the PRO 300 from 50 to 200.