SonicWall has produced solid firewall products for the Soho market in the past, and the TZ 170 is no exception. Designed for the smaller office, it offers the ease of use and flexibility required for such environments.

It has a five-port autosensing 10/100Mbit/s LAN switch in addition to its 10/100Mbit/s WAN port, and there's also a seventh optional port (fitted on our review unit) called a WorkPort. This can be configured in a variety of ways, but straight out of the box it allows you to create a securely isolated network segment, much like a DMZ port.

The basic unit supports 10 users and can be upgraded to unlimited users for £645 (ex.VAT).

SonicWall's SonicOS software provides easy, wizard-based configuration and its well designed interface makes short work of locating the configuration pages.

Network services are offered on subscription basis, and these can be accessed and configured via the software. Subscriptions are available for services such as content filtering (£225 ex.VAT per year) and antivirus protection (£130 ex.VAT).

Upgrading to the SonicOS Enhanced software provides additional features such as WAN redundancy (which uses the WorkPort to act as a secondary WAN port), ISP failover and load balancing, object based management for administering a large number of users, and granular policy based NAT.

SonicWall recently announced the addition of intrusion detection, designed to protect against worms, trojans and other threats. This is expected to be released in Q2 2004 and to cost £350 a year per appliance. This is a welcome step and pushes down the cost of a technology that's normally found only in larger, corporate environments.

Overall, the flexibility of the TZ 170, in terms of the number of supported users and its VPN capability, offers plenty of scope for growth, and the numerous optional add-ons make the TZ 170 a powerful security tool that can grow with your business.

Contact: SonicWall (01344) 668090
www.sonicwall.com

Specifications:

• Dimensions: 23x16.8x4.1cm Weight 520g
• Firewall architecture: Stateful packet inspection
• Processor: SonicWall security processor
• Memory: 64MB RAM, 8MB Flash
• Interfaces: WAN 1x10/100Base-T, LAN 5x10/100Base-T
• Security standards: IPSec, PPTP, L2TP, WEP, IKE, PPPoE, RADIUS
• Protocols supported: DHCP, NAT, TCP/IP, and SNMP
• Management software: Integrates into SonicWall's global management
• Performance: 90 Mbit/s Stateful packet inspection, 30+ Mbit/s 3DES and AES VPN
• Warranty: 90 days firmware, 12 months hardware RTB