ProSecure UTM150

Netgear's ProSecure UTM appliances have traditionally targeted small businesses, however the UTM150 moves the main focus as much as larger companies. Together with 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 cost effective; Netgear doesn't use a per-user licensing scheme and the model name only refers back to the suggested choice of supported users the hardware can handle. The subscription provides access to a call collection of security services, together with 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 supply 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 the complete UTM boxes. However, there are a couple of subtle differences between the UTM150 and its smaller ProSecure stablemates. The applying 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 occupied with, you furthermore may 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 recent services; the true-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 contend with the upper specification, but this isn't an appliance you will need near you within the office. Meanwhile, the manual hasn't been updated to hide the four WAN port modes, but you'll choose a first interface and, if it fails, have the applying 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 accordance with link speed and usage.

Traffic metering is also 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 were breached.

The appliance supports quite a lot of authentication methods and so that you can force users to login to the application before being allowed internet access. an international web access policy is applied to all users but this may be customised using exception rules assigned to precise domains at the appliance. Rules help you either block or allow specific web categories, applications or file extensions for a website. Anti-spam options are extensive as, which include black and white lists and RBLs, you've Mailshell's distributed spam analysis, which offers five sensitivity levels. For SMTP you may tag, block or log spam messages, while for POP3 you may 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 can also 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 typical feature makes the UTM150 even better value.

The Commtouch web-filtering service provides greater than 60 categories which you can block or allow. A default set of categories is blocked straight from the box, but these may be modified to fit and the net interface provides a handy look-up tool to match 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 need available for remote access; you are able to apply Radius, LDAP, AD or local authentication.

Apart from supporting a better choice 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 gives an imposing range of safety features for the pricetag.
Dave Mitchell