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Dell Announces Intent To Acquire SonicWALL

Posted by Soulskill on from the dude-you're-gettin-a-sonicwall dept.

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."

4 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. The Only One I've Seen.. by bennett000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:The Only One I've Seen.. by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Informative

      We are a SonicWall partner - a large portion of our clients use them.

      Sure you can do content filtering, but it's impossible to configure any sort of granularity in the system such as, allow these users to access these sites, those to access those site. I've worked with multiple Sonicwall engineers on this issue. You just can't do it. Period. There is one set of rules that you can either allow or deny. That's it. Similarly, the bandwidth management sucks if you want to do any sort of QoS.

      This all boils down to the UI really. GUI's and firewalls are just a mix that only work for simplistic needs. Once your needs pass a certain threshold, they just get in the way and make it nearly impossible to do the configuration you need. Sonicwall designed their interface for the "part time office manager IT person" and grew from there. And it shows. Cisco frankly is in a similar situation. Use the GUI for simple crap to get you going, the command line when you actually need to do anything complex.

      As another poster mentioned, pretty much all firewalls out there are embedded Linux or BSD, and just slap their GUI on top along with other random services. Some do a pretty good job of exposing the underlying power of the native firewall, others, not so much. Sonicwall's is pretty good for exposing that power but the web GUI gets in the way all too often when you need to do a lot of similar rules or complex rules.

      Finally, another poster recommended using GMS to manage multiple Sonicwalls. This product is insanely priced and only makes sense in a larger organization that would be better served with alternative products (Cisco, etc.) Despite all the high end models they sell, I wouldn't use ANY of them for an organization with high-end needs. Sonicwall's nitch is small business with 50 or fewer users and in my opinion, selling and supporting these things, that's the only market that it's viable to use them in.

  2. Re:If you were going to buy a software company.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Bad news for HP by PrimalChrome · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whereas I agree that IBM's server solutions stand a head higher than Dell, I would not dream of saying the same of HP. We are primarily a Dell shop and looked at swapping over to HP after numerous issues with Dell's Partner program. At the end of last year, HP accounted for 5% of our server install base. They accounted for closer to 20% of our server degraded/downtime for clients.

    Horrid product support consisting of smug warranty reps with little product knowledge. Getting parts was even more of a chore. Dell's 4 hour turnaround on parts is generally just that. 4 hours. HP's 4 hour parts warranty was regularly 24 hours, and in one instance, four days. Yes, days. Admittedly the actual failure rate was comparable with Dell (not better), but when you couple it with a disdain for supporting their products....sorry, we're done with HP.

    I also think you're spot on with the take on Equallogic's gear and Sonicwall's future at Dell.