Product Reviews

SonicWALL has always offered an impressive range of firewall appliances, with the PRO 300 taking a well-deserved Labs Winner award in the last Enterprise firewall group test. It has since been sitting pretty on the PC Pro A List, fighting off all challengers until now, as it has finally been superseded. At first glance, the new PRO 330 looks an equally tempting proposition, particularly on price, coming in below much of the competition at this level.

Internally, there are a few differences - the processor hasn't changed but memory has been quadrupled to 64MB, while fault tolerance has been improved with a pair of independent power supplies. LAN, WAN and DMZ ports have been moved to the front and are tied in to a basic status display panel.

More new features are evident inside. A single-armed mode uses the WAN port as a VPN termination point, allowing the appliance to be placed between an existing firewall and Internet router. VPN support has been improved too - the price includes a 200-user licence for the client software and the PRO 330 can now detect dead IPSec tunnels and automatically renegotiate them rather than wait for them to time out.

Ease of installation has always been a key feature of SonicWALL appliances and the PRO 330 is no exception. Point a web browser at its default

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IP address and on first contact the appliance automatically loads a Wizard to help with initial configuration. Provide IP addresses for the unit, the WAN gateway and DNS servers, select your mode of Internet access and you're ready to go. The web interface hasn't changed either, but this is no bad thing as it's intuitive, with each function grouped neatly in a side bar for easy selection.

Basic protection is implemented after initial configuration and this can be customised by adding new services and rules for controlling incoming, outgoing and DMZ connection attempts. You'll need to know your port numbers and protocols to modify these, but SonicWALL does provide good online help and documentation.

Plenty of tools are on offer for managing what LAN users can access on the Internet. You can block all ActiveX controls, Java applets, cookies and web proxies, create custom lists of trusted and forbidden websites or use keywords to block specific websites. The latter feature only applies to the URL and not the site content, but it's possible to set up trusted domains and block Internet access to every site except those selected.

A huge range of options is available. You can implement McAfee anti-virus measures and content filtering using a regularly downloaded list from SonicWALL, N2H2 or Websense Enterprise. These upgrades are easily applied and SonicWALL now offers its ViewPoint software, which provides good reporting tools and real-time monitoring.

All too often, we've found higher-end firewall appliances difficult to install and configure, which leads to a dangerously false sense of security. This isn't the case with the PRO 330, as it retains the impressive ease of use and simplicity of its predecessor. Furthermore, it delivers a powerful firewall at a reasonable price and backs it up with a comprehensive VPN package and a good range of optional features.