Stories by: Joel Snyder

Web-based applications and products like Apple's iTunes have made it easy to turn a laptop or a desktop into a music player. At the same time, thousands of radio stations are re-broadcasting their audio over the Internet to anyone who wants to listen. But what if you want to listen to, say, modern jazz from Mali or pop from Paris without dragging around a laptop? Enter the Internet radio: an appliance that looks like a radio and has an antenna -- but connects over Wi-Fi to the Internet, and streams audio to speakers.

While Web-based music offerings from Apple (iTunes) and others have made it easy to turn a laptop or desktop into a music player, what if you want to listen without dragging around your PC? Enter the stand-alone Internet radio, which looks like a radio and has an antenna, but connects via Wi-Fi to the Internet and streams audio to speakers. We recently tried out five such devices. Check the slides to see what we thought.

The world of network access control is being drawn, irresistibly, into Microsoft's orbit now that the Redmond giant's full repertoire of Network Access Protection client, server and policy components are out there in the real world.

Most network equipment vendors are ready to up the ante in terms of how their gear can control access in a NAC deployment.

Last month, SonicWall rolled out its next-generation unified threat management firewall appliance geared for the enterprise. In our exclusive test of the Network Security Appliance E7500, results show that SonicWall has, indeed, crashed through the speed barrier.

The data center may seem a big place, but watts are watts: Every one you use costs you money. Two firewalls in a high-availability pair may not be the biggest power expense in a computer room, but that's no excuse to waste wattage.

Despite the fact that VPNs and firewalls have been residing on the same box for over seven years, our testing of both of the site-to-site and remote access VPN capabilities showed an astonishing variation on the quality of VPN implementations.

Because every network requires a different way of measuring performance and most UTM products offer thousands of deployment options, it's hard to draw even general conclusions about how these products will behave in your network. However, we can say that most enterprises will want to proceed cautiously when adding UTM features, such as intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus scanning, to their perimeter firewall boxes, because of their unpredictable impact on total system performance.

Are there unified threat management (UTM) firewalls with the chops to provide the perimeter security functions that an enterprise needs?

One of the appliances we received was simply an off-the-shelf server (IBM's System x3650). Other devices ranged from very lightly customized (Secure Computing put an IPS accelerator board and a customized BIOS in a Dell box to yield its Sidewinder 2150D) to the heavily engineered chassis found in the Juniper ISG-1000 and the Fortinet FortiGate 3600A.

The high-availability (HA) and scalability features in the enterprise UTM firewalls we tested range from very fancy to dead simple.