UPDATE: SonicWall Unleashes Two Firewalls

The company also has welcomed back a former channel executive, Dave Crilley, as director of channel marketing.

The SonicWall Pro 3060 and 4060 are rack-mounted systems that include higher porter counts than previous products. More notably, they both include SonicWall OS 2.0, an update to the company's firewall software platform.

"We have a very broad management reporting capability built into the product," said Douglas Brockett, vice president of worldwide marketing for SonicWall, Santa Clara, Calif.

The OS comes in two editions, SonicOS 2.0s, which offers a set of standard features such as easy network discovery and rapid setup, while SonicOS 2.0e adds support for multiple interfaces, WAN/WAN failover and load balancing, among other things.

SonicWall Pro 3060, priced at $2,795 with SonicOS 2.0s in a base configuration, is being touted as the company's offering for 100MBps VPNs. The appliance can be upgraded to include SonicOS 2.0e plus 8x5 support for another $695. SonicWall Pro 4060, priced at $4,995 with SonicOS 2.0e, is being targeted at more complex VPN installations.

"We're getting pulled more and more into very broad network deployments that include systems integrators," Brockett said.

In general, the new SonicWall appliances have been by far the easiest firewalls to manage, but the new products offer a much more mature feature set than in the past, said Rich Forsen, president of Network Depot, a Herndon, Va.-based security solution provider. For evidence, he pointed to both SonicOS 2.0e, which offers policy-based management, as well as the router-based configuration of the new products.

"I think what it really does is put them into more medium to large businesses," Forsen said.

SonicWall is gaining momentum among retail operations supporting multiple locations as well as the education market, Brockett said.

SonicWall ships approximately 25,000 to 30,000 units per quarter, second only to Cisco in firewall/VPN marketshare during 2002, Brockett said. SonicWall had second-quarter revenue of $21.4 million.