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SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SonicWALL, Inc. , a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced that Canucks Sports & Entertainment has deployed a SonicWALL Network Security Appliance (NSA) 5000 solution to provide high-performance network security for the company and their home-ice venue, General Motors Place.

"When we selected the NSA 5000, we had to consider the needs of global media who report and file stories from General Motors Place," said William Cheng, IT Manager, Canucks Sports & Entertainment. "SonicWALL had the performance specs we needed to deliver a world class working environment."

Cheng's primary ongoing commitment is to the National Hockey League home team Vancouver Canucks -- and their fans. New technology has helped the team improve its coaching and scouting capabilities. "The NSA 5000 gives our infrastructure the high-performance security we need to reach our goals," said Cheng.

The NSA 5000 is one of SonicWALL's next-generation Unified Threat Management firewalls. The solution combines high-speed intrusion prevention, file and content inspection and powerful application firewall capabilities with advanced networking, high availability and flexible configuration.

During the work day, Canucks Sports and Entertainment runs a typical business; but in the evenings, it is anything but typical, hosting live-broadcast professional sporting events, business conventions and world-class concerts in an 18,630-seat capacity arena. "We're not just running e-mail and word processing," said Cheng. "We've got arena operations, security systems, and physical access control systems."

Cheng needed a solution to secure exceptionally high volumes of network traffic. For example, every hockey game is digitally recorded for analysis by the coaching staff, and embedded with informational metatags to assist in scouting. Another high volume channel is at merchandising points-of-sale during game intermissions. "We have twenty-three lanes of POS trying to push through a transaction every thirty seconds," said Cheng. "Any delays can mean lost revenue."

Before upgrading to the NSA 5000, throughput consumption was ranging near 60 percent; now it is only in the single digits. "We considered all of our options but we chose to go with the SonicWALL NSA 5000," said Cheng. "We are very pleased with our decision."

With a breakthrough multi-core hardware design, Reassembly-free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) and six GbE interfaces, the NSA 5000 enables Cheng to ensure real-time internal and external network protection without compromising performance.

Cheng relies on SonicWALL ViewPoint reporting to keep him informed on ongoing network issues. "Viewpoint is a great tool that gives us a view of our bandwidth trending, shows us whether we need to address it, and makes it easer to communicate issues with management."

"From my point of view, all organizations have to change over time," said Cheng. "The NSA 5000 that lets me deal with changes more quickly, reliably and cost-effectively."