ProSecure UTM150

Netgear's ProSecure UTM appliances have traditionally targeted small businesses, however the UTM150 moves the point of interest as much as larger companies. Including a plug-and-go installation, it greater than doubles performance over the older UTM50 model with firewall and anti-virus throughputs boosted to 900Mbps and 130Mbps respectively.

It looks reasonable; Netgear doesn't use a per-user licensing scheme and the model name only refers back to the suggested variety of supported users the hardware can handle. The subscription provides access to a call choice of security services, including an SPI firewall, IPS, anti-virus, anti-spam, URL category filtering, basic IM and P2P controls plus support for IPsec and SSL VPNs. The UTM150 also targets businesses that want multiple high-speed WAN connections with failover and cargo balancing. The older UTM50 has two Gigabit WAN ports; the UTM150 increases these to four.

Netgear has some well-known names on its guest list with Sophos taking care of virus scanning, Mailshell handling anti-spam, and the well-respected Commtouch providing web-filtering services. The application also employs Netgear's own stream scanning technology, which uses multi-threading to produce near real-time scanning of network traffic.

The ProSecure UTM appliances all function as transparent gateways so we just slipped the UTM150 in between our test LAN and internet connection and we were able to go.

Pointing an online browser on the appliance's default LAN IP address brings up a tidy web interface that on first glance looks common across your entire UTM boxes. However, there are a couple of subtle differences between the UTM150 and its smaller ProSecure stablemates. The appliance security section has some additional features. None of those are documented but Netgear has added five extra services for blocking iTunes, Rhapsody, QuickTime, RealPlayer and Winamp. Although nothing to get fascinated with, you furthermore mght get options for blocking GoToMyPC handheld remote control sessions, the Alexa Toolbar, WeatherBug and the Yahoo! Toolbar. The monitoring section has also been changed, because the dashboard includes counters for the hot services; the genuine-time threat and network traffic graphs are actually Flash-based.

We also noticed the UTM150 is significantly noisier than the UTM50. The fans have clearly been ramped as much as handle the upper specification, but this isn't an appliance you will want near you within the office. Meanwhile, the manual hasn't been updated to hide the four WAN port modes, but you are able to choose a major interface and, if it fails, have the application rollover to 1 of any other three interfaces. Load balancing distributes traffic across all active WAN ports and uses either round robin or weightings in response to link speed and usage.

Traffic metering will also be enabled on any of the WAN ports. This enforces monthly upstream and downstream limits in MB and either blocks all web traffic or allows only email when these thresholds had been breached.

The appliance supports a variety of authentication methods and so that you can force users to login to the application before being allowed internet access. a world web access policy is applied to all users but this may be customised using exception rules assigned to express domains at the appliance. Rules make it easier to either block or allow specific web categories, applications or file extensions for a site. Anti-spam options are extensive as, in addition to black and white lists and RBLs, you've got Mailshell's distributed spam analysis, which offers five sensitivity levels. For SMTP that you could tag, block or log spam messages, while for POP3 you could only tag them. Infected mail attachments is also stripped out and a custom message inserted within the subject line, but no mail quarantine facilities are possible.

Sophos's virus scanning may well be applied to SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols and all signature and database updates are automated with checks as often as every quarter-hour. HTTP, FTP and HTTPS traffic is additionally scanned, and adding the latter as a normal feature makes the UTM150 even better value.

The Commtouch web-filtering service provides greater than 60 categories that you could block or allow. A default set of categories is blocked straight from the box, but these could be modified to fit and the net interface provides a handy look-up tool to envision what websites are being classed under.

The UTM150 supports as much as 150 site-to-site IPsec and 75 SSL VPN tunnels and, in both cases, wizards help set them up. For the latter, you utilize network objects to define the systems and services you will have available for remote access; you could apply Radius, LDAP, AD or local authentication.

Apart from supporting a better collection of users, the UTM150 doesn't introduce any significant new features to the present ProSecure range. However, it's only as easy to deploy and provides a formidable range of safety features for the cost.
Dave Mitchell