Netgear's $499 Firewall: Gigabit for SMBs

Netgear is launching their first sub-$500 gigabit firewall for business. The name — the SRX5308 ProSafe SSL VPN Firewall — may not roll off your tongue. But here’s what’s noting for solutions providers.

The SRX5308 ProSafe SSL VPN Firewall does more than just be a firewall with a long name. It actually forwards WAN packets at gigabit line rate, and it offers a multi-WAN configuration. Netgear also claims it has the distinction of being the first firewall to provide an excess of 1 gigbit per second performance for a sub-$500 price tag. (They cite it costing $.50 a Mbps. Cute.)

But the impetus for launching the firewall involved demand for faster WAN connections, virtualization and cloud computing. The device features four gigabit WAN ports, in fact, that provide a VPN, session-based load balancing, a “no compromises” secure connection and future-proofed to “support sophisticated multimedia and… higher throughput applications” (Read: VoIP).

There’s also hardware-accelerated data flow for enabling 1 Gbps LAN-To-WAN. For those wondering about VPN specs, the SRX5308 can do to 125 IPsec VPN tunnels and 50 SSL VPN tunnels simultaneously.

The SRX5308 VPN router also bumps up security with the ability to mitigate:

What’s more, there’s granular bandwidth management capabilities, and VLAN support for separation of guest traffic from critical production servers. Netgear also offers an auto-detect for ISP connection, web-based GUI for the control center, and a VPN wizard.

Netgear says the SRX5308 is compatible with Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, and Linux OS and comes with full 24/7 technical support, plus that lifetime warranty.

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