I had the pleasure of setting another of these morning. However, there was an important difference. SonicWall (Dell) has released new firmware that radically changes how this unit is configured.
For better or worse, it will take some getting used. It’s always important to use the latest firmware so it is what it is. They did this to all of their units a few years ago so I it’s to be expected. Change for functionally I completely understand and support. Change just so you can say you’ve done something different I think is a waste of time and money for all involved. The previous generation redsign offered a “classic view”, but that wasn’t immediately apparent in this version.
Accompanying the new user interface in the unit is a new MySonicWall.com. After registering the unit through the old user interface and updating to the newest firmware the SonicWall Status page looks happy and everything is ok. However, when I look at the MySonicWall page it shows the unit offline. I’m positive it’s not. When I look at the page, I see another unit that a different technican setup this week is also “offline”. A quick check of our managed server’s network status confirms that they both indeed online. I guess this is just a bug in the new fancy interface. All of our older units are showing as “online” as they should be.
Hardware specification wise, it’s hard to thing of something that this thing won’t happen for a small to mid-size business. The published numbers show a firewall inspection rate of 750Mbps, support for 25 VLANS, 10 site-to-site VPNs, and up to 60 simultaneous VPN users.
It’s around $700, so this is not your typical SOHO (small office home office) unit–they have another model for that.