Taking On The Enterprise

The vendor traditionally has targeted the SMB market, but its new Firebox Vclass series of appliances meets the demands of its larger customers and distributed enterprises, said Mark Stevens, senior vice president of network security at WatchGuard, based here.

The appliance comes in four models. The Firebox V100, tailored for data centers, features two 1-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, two high-availability ports, 600-Mbps firewall performance and 300-Mbps 3DES VPN throughput and supports up to 20,000 IPSec VPN tunnels. The device also has multitenant capability and server load balancing.

"This is really our first step into the Gigabit arena," Stevens said. "It's very important to have the right feature set [for that market."

The V80 supports up to 8,000 IPSec tunnels and has four 10/100 Fast Ethernet ports, two high-availability ports, 270-Mbps firewall performance and 150-Mbps 3DES VPN throughput. The V60 offers 200-Mbps firewall performance and 100-Mbps 3DES VPN throughput and supports up to 400 IPSec tunnels.

The V10, designed to work as a VPN end point in a small office, has 75-Mbps firewall performance and 20-Mbps 3DES VPN throughput and can be licensed to support 10 or 25 users.

The Vclass line competes with products from Netscreen Technologies and Cisco Systems, Stevens said.

MSR prices range from $24,990 for the V100 and $10,990 for the V80 to $590 for the V10.

Joel Wonicker-Cook, director of sales and marketing at LNS Technologies, Tampa, Fla., said the Vclass line will help boost WatchGuard's position at the high end of the market. "What it will do up front is introduce . . . WatchGuard as an enterprise player," he said. "This positions WatchGuard in a place that some people may not have thought they were considered before."

Also last week, WatchGuard announced its RapidStream ASIC-based VPN/firewall appliances operating on Check Point software.