Stories about: CrossBeam

The global financial crisis so visible this past month is beginning to take its toll on information-technology spending, though IT security spending is expected to be spared in what many think will be a dismal coming year.

The Unified Threat Management (UTM) market has already started to outgrow the point security solution segment, said analyst firm IDC.

Following a review of its infrastructure, the Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) is replacing a mix of point solutions with two unified threat management network security appliances.

The concept of UTM (unified threat management) and the devices that fit into the product segment are at long last finding a home in some enterprise IT environments.

When we tested firewall performance as part of in our UTM firewall test we focused on how well the products would push inspected packets along with other UTM features, specifically intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus, turned on. However, many enterprise managers will use these devices primarily just as firewalls, and might be curious how fast they'd operate without UTM slowing them down.

There is no real agreement about whether antivirus software is required in or even a good idea for an enterprise-class firewall.

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.

We tested the OSPF-routing capabilities of the UTM devices in order to simulate the kind of multiple-exit network (two Internet gateways) that might be common in a large network.

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.

IPv6 is the writing on the firewall.