Before I chose this unit for our company, I did extensive research involving security, features, price and performance. The SonicWALL PRO beat the competition hands-down. In the comparison, I looked at WatchGuard, Cisco and many others.

The SonicWALL PRO was a snap to setup, it took about 15 minutes to set it up to replace the existing NAT router. Included in the setup was the time to update the firmware to the latest version, for free of course! The Admin interface is much better than many web interfaces I have seen, but I would like it even more if it had a Telnet command line and SNMP support. It does have support for a SysLog server however, and automatically forwards alerts and logs into my mailbox.

I performed a number of tests on the unit after it was installed, just to put it under the magnifying glass. I collected up a set of nasty little hacker tools and bombarded our network from outside. I was astounded to see that not one attack was "successful", and each was logged, with my correct IP. The SonicWALL pretty much ignored me if I tried to use a spoofed IP, deflected all kinds of deformed IP packets and sent every invalid TCP/ICMP packet I sent it right into the bit bucket. With stealth mode turned on, our network was like a black hole from the Internet, only allowing the traffic I specified - fantastic!

I am still working on VPN with the unit however, I am working with tech support to figure out where the problem is located between two of our SonicWALL units. Their staff has always returned my emails within about 4 hours, but usually less than 30 minutes. Their staff is about par for the industry, the first response is always "follow the instructions in this FAQ and everything should be OK". I'm used to this, even expect it, as most people immediately think they are special, and "nobody has ever had this problem before" and don't bother reading the FAQs!

UPDATE!
The VPN problem was actually in one of our routers... one of the routers between sites had an IPSEC protocol issue and has since been solved by the very helpful Tech Support Manager and his team at SonicWALL. The VPN tunnel is extremely quick, it negotiates a tunnel in about 40ms even bouncing through 15 routers over the Internet! That equates to ONE ping!

I would highly recommend this unit to all companies with more than 50 systems needing a connection to the Internet. We have 5 servers and 42 systems located in our main building alone with more users in remote locations, and the SonicWALL was a great investment!

Another Update
With the newest firmware updates (v6.1.x), The entire SonicWALL family will now be available for SNMP monitoring and the higher-end models have console access via the serial port. I have also updated the price we paid to include the additional features we have installed.

The updated interface with the new firmware improves on the already very good configuration interface. Having the console port to fall back on absolutely forces me to raise my rating!

Security gets even better with the option to Randomize IP IDs, which will allow you to scramble any attempts to identify what hardware is protecting your network. While I am not the biggest fan of "security through obscurity", this is an added comfort to the very effective "Stealth Mode". I can hardly wait to see what they add next!

I should mention that the current implementation of SNMP does leave a little bit to be desired, as you cannot currently see all traffic flow numbers. It does show up on my management console and does implement a number of SNMP traps.

Recommended: Yes