Product Reviews

Panda Software may already have a well-respected range of personal, small-business and corporate anti-virus software products, but it still can't resist the allure of the appliance market. However, whereas many vendors have gone for the full course of anti-spam, anti-virus and firewall protection, with the GateDefender Panda has concentrated solely on anti-virus measures.

The family currently consists of two members, both designed to function as transparent gateways for easy installation. The GateDefender 7100 on review is a hardware partnership of a Supermicro mini-chassis and motherboard, which Panda reckons has enough clout to handle from 25 to 500 users, 80,000 messages an hour and 8Mb/sec of web traffic. The operating system is Windows NT 4 Embedded and, naturally, it runs Panda's own virus-scanning engine.

Appliances that function as transparent gateways are usually the easiest to install and the GateDefender is no exception. You simply connect the appliance behind your Internet connection and firewall and in front of your LAN. All traffic is then routed through the appliance and no configuration is required for your network clients. We installed the GateDefender behind a Windows 2000 SBS proxy server and initially encountered no problems. The appliance is the headless variety so all access is via a simple, well-designed web interface. Virus signature updates are completely automated.

The home page provides plenty of performance statistics, including inbound and outbound traffic for each interface along with lists of files scanned and viruses caught for each protocol. The GateDefender scans all web browser, download and email traffic as it passes through the appliance. However, if you're putting the appliance behind a proxy server you may find, as we did, that additional port numbers will need to be added in the browser interface before it will correctly scan for viruses.

There's virtually nothing to do for setting up responses to an infection. If a virus is spotted, Panda's engine will attempt to cure it, but if this fails it will simply block and remove it or just strip out the offending code. For email, the message will still be sent to the recipient but an infected attachment will be removed first. Alerts can be sent to multiple email addresses and the message content can be easily customised to include additional information about the infection. Unfortunately, virtually any configuration changes made require the appliance to be restarted, which will block all traffic, although this process takes only a few seconds.

A problem with appliances that function as gateways is that if they crash, all inbound and outbound traffic will be blocked. However, Panda has this covered with a load-balancing feature. With this option selected, multiple GateDefender appliances automatically set up traffic load balancing with each other and provide redundancy in the event of one unit failing.

The GateDefender is just about as plug-and-play as you can get for an anti-virus appliance, and we found it very easy to use. However, there's still the menace of spam to worry about so you may want to consider products such as the Spam Firewall 300 from Barracuda Networks, which offers both anti-virus and anti-spam measures for a similar price.