According to the company, SonicOS 4.0 operates on all Sonicwall firewall appliances and uses its reassembly-free deep packet inspection capabilities coupled with application firewall, stateful failover with state synchronization, single sign-on, and inbound load balancing to provide a unified threat management protection. The centrally manageable and automatic update functionality of SonicOS 4.0 reduces management and operational costs.
The company claims that stateful failover feature improves network reliability with uninterrupted operation in the event of hardware or software failures on the firewall. The single sign-on feature allows users to access multiple network resources with a single workstation login for Windows domain or workstation users. It allows administrators to configure policies to enable inbound load balancing for network resources and supports the round robin, random distribution, sticky IP, block remap, and symmetrical remap load balancing algorithms. It also supports transmission control protocol (TCP) and internet control message protocol (ICMP) based probing mechanisms.
John Gmuender, vice president of engineering at Sonicwall said: SonicOS 4.0 enhances the delivery, configuration and customization of constantly updated threat protection services via Sonicwall network security appliances.
Sonicwall application firewall allows custom access control tools that control network traffic and prevent data leakage. The reassembly-free deep packet inspection engine examines every packet of all protocols across every interface on the network for malicious and unproductive communications. Its security solutions continuously communicate with the company’s worldwide threat prevention databases to provide immediate protection updates.
Additional features include hypertext transport protocol secure (HTTPS) content filtering, which allows Sonicwall to intercept and inspect IP-address and prevent network users from accessing HTTPS proxy sites and other HTTPS content. The services dashboard provides global and applicant count of blocked network threats using Sonicwall. The enhanced packet capture mechanism allows administrators to capture and examine the contents of individual data packets. The multiple administrator support feature allows for multiple concurrent administrative sessions, including support for non-configuration mode sessions and read only access to the Sonicwall management interface.
Sonicwall’s rival, Cisco Systems, launched Unified Communications System 6.0 in March 2007, which according to the company, will improve the productivity of mobile employees and deliver unified communications to small and medium-sized businesses. Built on open industry standards for configuration flexibility, the system integrates wired, wireless, and mobile devices to create a secure solution for the entire organization.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
