With Dell’s acquisition of network security vendor, SonicWall finalised, Dell SonicWall vice-president, Richard Ting, has confirmed that the channel will maintain its sales position.

PC vendor, Dell, has completed the acquisition of security vendor, SonicWall, and the company will operate as Dell SonicWall henceforth.

When we tested four next-gen firewalls strictly on performance, we found that the products could forward packets at impressive rates, but throughput dropped when advanced security features were turned on. We now dive deep into application identification and control - the defining features of next-gen firewalls - to find out what works and what doesn't.

Knowing what's happening on your network is a pre-requisite to controlling the traffic. We call that visibility because it combines all of the information the firewall knows, including session and application information, traffic volumes, and rate information, into a way to "see" into your network -- to give you visibility.

Enterprise firewalls must have policies to control traffic, ability to create site-to-site VPNs using standards-based IPsec, translate addresses and port numbers (NAT) when needed, and apply basic bandwidth management to traffic. They must also support features such as high availability (active/passive or active/active), virtual LANs, Ethernet link aggregation, and global management systems.

URL filtering has become a "checkbox" feature on most Unified Threat Management firewalls, and no wonder: it doesn't require a lot of imagination to do it right, and it's hard to really differentiate yourself or do a bad job of it.

If one of the main advantages of a next-generation firewall is application and protocol identification and control, then SSL decryption is a basic requirement. We looked at the SSL decryption capabilities of the next-generation firewalls to see how well they would be able to discover applications, protocols, and URLs hidden within encrypted connections.

Melbourne-based value-added distributor, Techplus, has hired Chris Barton as its general manager.