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Dell Announces Intent To Acquire SonicWALL
New submitter iroc_eater writes with news of an announcement from Dell that it plans to acquire SonicWall, a security services provider.
"SonicWall’s technology detects and protects networks from intrusions and malware attacks, and helps protect data. Dell is buying services and software businesses as the PC market faces competition from smartphones and tablets. Last month, the company hired CA Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Swainson to oversee the software push, and today he said security is an important part of that strategy. 'My goal is to make software a meaningful part of Dell’s overall portfolio, so that means that this is not the last thing you’re going to see from us,' Swainson said."
Why wouldn't you buy a good one? The hotel I stay at for business has a sonicwall firewall, and it isn't the greatest. I can see a lot of vulnerabilities in it; I just don't exploit them.
The only SonicWall device I've ever had to work with had a limit of 10 nodes that could "connect to the internet". The limit was really 10 nodes that could NAT to port 80. Every other port was open. I always figured that if sonic wall didn't care about protecting their licenses why would they care about protecting their networks?
To be fair, half the hotels I've stayed at have had non-working or badly-misconfigured wireless routers. At my last job we had a couple of SonicWALL3060s that worked pretty fucking good, and all of our remote workers had TZ170s, the difference is they were set up by people who knew what the fuck they were doing.
Dell is a truly innovative company with a very interesting approach to manufacturing and sales; their efficient inventory management (with stock never older than a week or so) is pretty impressive. And unlike other big vendors they understand the needs of small and medium businesses and they make it very easy to become a customer (easy financing, good online inventory, etc.).
Their consumer or entry-level products are not as flashy as Apple or as robust as Lenovo but they are very competitive on the price/quality ratio and they came a long way over the last 10 years. For servers nowadays the PowerEdge as pretty much equivalent to the products from other vendors (HP, IBM) but less expensive, and their storage offering is pretty good (Equallogic, Compellent, etc.) with aggressive pricing as well. If I had to build a new data center today they would definitely be in my vendors shortlist.
I think it's a good thing that they move in the software field even if I am not a big fan of the products they acquired so far. If they follow their usual strategy within a few years they will offer a viable, cost-effective alternative to other big vendors. I guess HP is the one that will get squeezed between the expensive, corporate solutions from IBM and the more affordable Dell products.
lucm, indeed.
Disclaimer: I work in the industry. I think of SonicWall as a worthy competitor, which is more than what I can say of many of the players on so called "NGFW" market.
Many of the comments here seem to miss the point of commercial solutions, entirely. The fact that you can set up a reasonably reliable traditional firewall on Linux is nothing. At least for those customers the vendors in this market are after. By the way, these customers rarely advertise their choices. (I hope they understand the strengths and weaknesses of their picks, though.)
These are some of the points many customers (which tend to have deep pockets to pay for their solutions) value:
- Reliable support.
- Usable and flexible policy and installation management.
- Useful, informative and manageable logs.
- Prepackaged rules (especially on deep packet inspection).
- High availability.
- High throughput.
- High coverage (especially inspection again).
- Certifications demanded in specific applications.
- Capability to support lots of streams (tens of millions of content-inspected connections and dozens of gigabits per second are not unheard of).
- Reliable and scalable deep packet inspection / stream inspection.
- Protocol inspection - potentially with decompression and decryption.
- Rule correlation associated with actions.
- Flexible alerts.
- User authentication.
- Integration with web site reputation services, spam prevention and such.
- Centrally managed corporate installations (dozens to tens of thousands of geographically distributed appliances).
- Prepackaged solutions with SLA: both physical and virtual appliances.
- ... and so on. Combine just couple of these, and running above-mentioned "Linux firewalls" become non-option...
The challenge is cost. What I have always looked for is a "security appliance" capable of least two WAN ports for load balancing and fail over. Dial up fail over that was available on some Netgear models was a freakin joke.
So Sonicwall, with its drawbacks, comes in at many many times cheaper in price to get the job done then Cisco and Fortinet. Sonicwall starts at around $270 and gives you a *heck* of a lot more than any consumer level router has by far.
I think Fortinet, at the bottom starts at $1500 the last time I checked?
Sonicwall is not perfect, but is the beginning of prosumer devices. You get what you pay for. Considering that I don't think Sonicwall is all that bad. They are a ton more stable than any Netgear or Linksys/Cisco piece of shit :)
You can get a Fortigate 60C for $500. I understand a Cisco Pix 501 is about the same
A 60C will run a business up to 50 employees easy, I've got clients using a 60C for 80+ staff with no problems. Fortigate support adds more, but Sonicwall do the same thing. Just try getting a Sonicwall support member to even talk to you without a support contract and without that, they are as useful as a Cheap-o Dlink.
I've had a complete nightmare getting SSL and IPSEC VPN running on Sonicwall, after 4 days of failure and no support from Sonicwall I just installed RRAS on a Windows server. With Fortinet, setting up both SSL and IPSEC is dead easy even without the user guides Fortinet publishes. Realistically, if you require more then an El-cheapo D-link and aren't willing to spend $500 to do it properly you will just end up flushing more then $500 of your time down the drain, especially with Sonicwall.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.