Joel Snyder

Cisco's AnyConnect Secure Mobility Solution is a two-box enterprise play that poses some problems for small and midsized businesses.

The Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) piece of the puzzle delivers firewall and VPN, but not the other security features found in an integrated unified threat management (UTM) device. For example, content scanning for malware requires an add-in hardware module and a subscription, as does intrusion prevention.

In 1999, Network World tested a dozen VPNs, with a product from Altiga Networks coming in tied for second place. Our main complaint was the lack of split-tunneling capability, a feature that was quickly added.

In 2000: Cisco acquired Compatible Systems and Altiga Networks. The Compatible product, which became the Cisco VPN 500 Series concentrator, was killed off in 2002.

Netgear's new security appliance takes on small-to-midsize business stalwarts such as Fortinet and Barracuda by including antispam, antimalware, and Web content filtering in a single unit that offers easy deployment and budget-preserving pricing.

How we tested Netgear's ware

In August, we tested Palo Alto Networks' PA-4020, the first fully application-aware firewall to be commercially marketed. When we attempted to test performance on the PA-4020 we ran into a hitch: Palo Alto's application identification logic discovered that we were using Spirent test tools.

While this was an interesting validation of their application identification logic, it came with a downside. Palo Alto uses the same tools, and as part of its internal test procedures, company engineers had disabled security inspection for the "Spirent" application -- with no way to turn it back on.

Palo Alto Networks' PA-4020 is not just another firewall.

Yes, it has what you'd expect in a basic firewall: 24 ports, divided into16 gigabit Ethernet ports and eight SFP ports. It has a rule base, some basic VPN capabilities, and a Web-based management interface. If the description ended there, Palo Alto would not likely make any headway into the enterprise firewall business which is already carved up between Check Point, Cisco, and Juniper (Compare products).

Web-based applications and products like Apple's iTunes have made it easy to turn a laptop or a desktop into a music player. At the same time, thousands of radio stations are re-broadcasting their audio over the Internet to anyone who wants to listen. But what if you want to listen to, say, modern jazz from Mali or pop from Paris without dragging around a laptop? Enter the Internet radio: an appliance that looks like a radio and has an antenna -- but connects over Wi-Fi to the Internet, and streams audio to speakers.

We recently looked at six of these devices (the market is quite crowded already, with more than a dozen products available). Just as it is with real radios, there are many differences between products that all seem to do the same thing. For this roundup, we tested the Sangean WFR-20, Grace Digital Audio's ITC-IR1000, ComOne's Phoenix, the C Crane Wi-Fi radio, Tangent's Quattro, and the Revo Pico.

Check Point has finally delivered some useful fruit of its December 2006 acquisition of NFR Security.

In late April, the company shipped IPS-1, the first version of the NFR intrusion prevention/detection system (IDS/IPS) to be integrated into Check Point's own security wares. Both the IPS sensor and its management toolkit now reside on Check Point's own SecurePlatform, a self-installing Linux-based security operating system that Check Point also uses for its other security products and management platforms.

A terabyte isn't what it used to be. Disks are slower than you think. And a Gigabit Ethernet is plenty of bandwidth for many storage applications.

Those are the three conclusions we came to after an intense round of testing 12 iSCSI storage-area network (SAN) servers.