Watchguard targets low-end boxes against Cisco and SonicWall

Watchguard is rolling out two firewall/VPN boxes aimed at smaller offices, as it said it would earlier this year.

The company is introducing this week the Firebox 500 and the V60L, two boxes that will become the low end of WatchGuard’s two firewall/VPN product families.

Details of the boxes will follow, but it is interesting to note that the company felt the need to quickly come up with gear to compete directly with specific boxes made by other vendors. In particular, Firebox 500 competes against the SonicWall Pro 100 and Cisco PIX 506E. The V60L is aimed at the NetScreen 25 appliance. The V60L is a reined-in version of the V60 h hardware, with its throughput held back by software.

WatchGuard says it did this because it was faster and less expensive than designing and building a separate box, and it allows customers to upgrade to the faster V60 by buying a software license and downloading the upgrade.

Good for WatchGuard for acting as quickly as possible. It is a good sign for the VPN market that it felt that putting out competing gear as soon as possible was essential. The market for IPSec VPNs must be maturing if competition can’t go ignored for a moment.

As for the new boxes, Firebox 500 is for sites with between 10 and 250 employees and supports remote access VPNs only. It costs $1,790. V60L is for sites with between 50 and 100 employees but is intended for making site-to-site connections to other VPN servers. It costs $3,990.

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