new sonicwall operating system delivers enhanced productivity and protection
SonicOS 4.0 provides users with a broad range of new features and configuration flexibility
SonicWALL, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNWL), a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced a new version of its proprietary firmware, SonicOS 4.0 Enhanced. This update provides users with easily managed network productivity and protection through new features and configuration flexibility, reducing both risk and administrative burden for IT managers.
With its extensive, centrally manageable and automatically updated functionality, SonicOS 4.0 marks a further step in the company’s goal of delivering reduced management and operational costs to businesses of all sizes.
Designed to operate on all SonicWALL firewall appliances, SonicOS 4.0 combines high-performance delivery of Unified Threat Management protection based on SonicWALL’s reassembly-free deep packet inspection capabilities, together with multiple new features. These include application firewall, stateful failover with state synchronization, high availability, single sign-on, and inbound load balancing.
“SonicOS 4.0 is a significant milestone, incorporating major security and administrative features,” said John Gmuender, vice president of Engineering at SonicWALL. “SonicOS 4.0 enhances the delivery, configuration and customization of constantly updated threat protection services via SonicWALL network security appliances. This marks an important milestone in our ability to deliver high performance threat prevention and protection for businesses of all sizes.”
SonicWALL Application Firewall offers users a set of customizable protection tools that prevent data leakage and afford precise control over network traffic. The granular policies enabled by SonicWALL Application Firewall allow custom access control on multiple levels. Capabilities of SonicWALL Application Firewall include inbound and outbound content control, application level access control, deep-packet inspection based bandwidth management, intelligent prevention functionality and digital rights management functionality.
SonicWALL Application Firewall gives users granular control over network traffic using a variety of manageable parameters. The primary functionality of this application layer access control feature is to regulate Web browsing, file transfer, e-mail, and e-mail attachments. Using the digital rights management component of application firewall, administrators have the ability to scan files and documents for content and keywords. Application firewall allows administrators to restrict file transfers of certain file names, file types, e-mail attachments, attachment types, e-mail with certain subjects, and e-mail or attachments with certain keywords or byte patterns.
Stateful Failover is a high availability feature in SonicWALL OS 4.0 that dramatically improves network reliability by ensuring uninterrupted operation in the event of hardware or software failures on the firewall. When Stateful Hardware Failover is enabled between two SonicWALL appliances, the primary appliance actively communicates with the backup to update most connection information. As a result, the backup appliance is always prepared to take over the active connections seamlessly with no detectable interruption to user connections.
The Single Sign-On capabilities in SonicOS provide a transparent user authentication mechanism that provides privileged access to multiple network resources with a single workstation login for Windows domain or workstation users. Inbound Load Balancing allows administrators to configure policies to enable inbound load balancing for network resources. SonicOS 4.0 enables support for the Round Robin, Random Distribution, Sticky IP, Block Remap and Symmetrical Remap load balancing algorithms, as well as TCP and ICMP based probing mechanisms to ensure availability of targets.
SonicWALL’s reassembly-free deep packet inspection engine examines every packet of every protocol, across every interface on the network, ensuring that malicious and unproductive communications are eliminated in accordance with the policy needs of the IT Administrator. SonicWALL’s dynamic security solutions continuously communicate with the company’s worldwide threat prevention databases to provide immediate protection updates, ensuring constant defense vigilance. SonicWALL delivers enterprise-class security to central sites, branch offices, and remote offices through a scalable line of security appliances, which may be controlled by SonicWALL’s Global Management System for rapid, effective control of every point of access in the network.
