Netgear Launches Sub-$500 Gigabit Firewall

By Kevin Parrish
published

It's faster than competitor products in the same price range.

Netgear said Monday (opens in new tab) that it had launched the ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall (opens in new tab) (SRX5308), a sub-$500 device that features hardware-accelerated data flow architecture that enables 1 Gbps LAN-to-WAN firewall throughput. The company also said that it also supports up to 125 IPsec VPN tunnels and 50 SSL VPN tunnels simultaneously, the latter of which uses industry-strength encryption algorithms, automatic cache cleanup, and more.

Boasting high performance, the SRX5308 will protect networks against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and "curb" hacker threats using Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI). The device also offers URL keyword filtering, SYSLOG support, a configurable hardware DMZ port, e-mail reporting, logging and real-time alerts.

"Quality-of-Service (QoS), WAN traffic metering, and bandwidth profiling give network managers granular bandwidth management capabilities, while VLAN support enables separation of guest traffic from critical production servers," the company said. "Four Gigabit LAN ports enable maximum internal data transfer speeds, while the four Gigabit WAN ports provide two modes of session-based load balancing as well as failover protection to ensure maximum throughput and reliable connectivity to the Internet."

Netgear's new ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall is compatible with Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, and Linux OS. The device is available now with a street price starting at $499 at various outlets.

Which is your favorite networking product brand? Let us know in the comments!

Kevin Parrish
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • edlivian
    can the quad wan take four dsl connections and give the full throughput of all four combined, cause if that is the case, it will be cheaper and more reiable for me to buy 4 dsl lines and dump my t1
    Reply
  • dman3k
    Only $300 less and I can finally put network security off on the network level and stop using desktop firewall/av software.
    Reply
  • kennyforgames
    50 dollars router is good enough for me already. home user. or maybe double router plus AVG free antivirus software. tri- protection.
    Reply
  • vectorm12
    Actually been eying Netgear's small Firewalls for quite some time too bad most of them cut out at around 60MBits/s hopefully there will be more capable products like this one coming out soon.
    Reply
  • darkknight22
    I wonder how it's configured. The reason I spend money on Cisco at this price range at work is because of its quality IOS abilities.

    I am intrigued to see a full Gbps wan to lan connection, that's usually found in much higher end firewalls.
    Reply
  • Gin Fushicho
    I'm just barely learning all this in school right now, and I gotta say.. that router sounds sexy.
    Reply
  • Zinosys
    Well, I'm on the way to getting my CCNA, so I will have to say Cisco.

    After them, the HP ProCurve series is really good stuff too.

    For the home, I'll have to go with Linksys (Cisco, d'oh!)
    Reply
  • super_tycoon
    And to think my FVS336G was super-awesome... sigh... Same with my Phenom II 965...
    Reply
  • TheKurrgan
    Its not going to be able to *BOND* the 4 connections, however it will be able to balance them. Which if you live anywhere remotely close to a CO would mean 4*6Mbit AVAILABLE bandwidth for use. Which means any ONE connection can use 6mbit.. Torrenting would be helped but thats about it.
    As far as netgear goes I've never been a fan of their stuff even in the home sector, and from what I've seen of their business class switches they are not in the same league as cisco and HP for Layer 3 + switches. Their dedicated VPN firewalls have done decent for IPSEC between offices at a rate of around 8mbit, but beyond that I think netgear stinks.
    Reply
  • super_tycoon
    edliviancan the quad wan take four dsl connections and give the full throughput of all four combined, cause if that is the case, it will be cheaper and more reiable for me to buy 4 dsl lines and dump my t1
    sorry, it doesn't work that way. Imagine having four mailboxes. While you could easily send info down with either address, the respondent will only reply to the sender address. A single line could get flooded, and all resemblance of additive speed is gone. The router won't learn A prints his tweets while B sends back novels. (Issue 1) Now, if you were to have a conversation with someone (visit a website), you wouldn't want to randomly switch over to using a different mailbox all the time. The responder has no way to know that you are, in fact, a mashup of four seemingly separate people. Simply, you would only be able to stream a video at one of the line's speed. (Issue 2) But, if you had a family of four individuals who all used the internet roughly identically, you could assign each his/her own line. Finally, the router does not have a means of splitting like traffic. All the load balancing is rule based, restricted to things like MAC, ethernet port, IP address range, or traffic type. I load balance with my fvs336g and it works great, but its just a way for me to somewhat lazily split up my bittorrent traffic with everything else.
    Reply