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| SonicWALL Delivers High-Performance Network Security for Birmingham-Southern College | |
| Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 10:01:00 AM | |
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Birmingham-Southern Deploys SonicWALL NSA E7500 to Establish Enterprise-class Unified Threat Management for Campus Network SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SonicWALL, Inc. , a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced that Birmingham-Southern College, a four-year, private liberal arts institution affiliated with the United Methodist Church based in Birmingham, Alabama, has deployed SonicWALL� E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E7500 firewalls to provide high-performance gateway firewall protection for its campus network. The campus network is comprised of approximately 1,000 college-owned Windows-based systems and 200 network laser printers, serving faculty, administration and multiple academic labs. "It has to be easy and it has to work all the time or I just couldn't do my job," said Jesse McKneely, Director of Infrastructure and Project Management. McKneely had decided to upgrade to the NSA E7500 after his previous SonicWALL PRO 5060 firewall began running at 40% of its intended capacity. The NSA E7500 protects against a wide range of network attacks using a re-assembly free deep packet inspection engine in combination with parallel performance 16-core architecture, for unprecedented ultra-high-speed threat protection, reliability and scalability. "I don't think I've activated half the available processors. That's fantastic, because we will inevitably be hit with the next big hack or virus, but I don't have any doubts that we have the security and throughput to handle it," said McKneely. The NSA E7500 also provides McKneely with a set of customizable Application Firewall tools for precise control and inspection of enterprise network traffic. "The E7500 gives me the tools I need to set up very specific rules for, say, blocking access to troublesome URLs. I would have trouble doing that with other firewalls." McKneely has succeeded in using his SonicWALL solution to deploy high-performance enterprise-class network security while keeping within the limits of his academic budget. "I've looked into other solutions with similar functionality such as Cisco, and they are all far more expensive. SonicWALL gives me the performance I need with more money left in my budget." The NSA E7500 fiber-optic ports allowed McKneely to easily and affordably relocate the firewall to support his server redundancy initiative. "We could have never done that without having the fiber-optic option. It saved us at least $10,000, not to mention a whole lot of my time. The beauty of it was that I was able to take the money I saved and apply it to a new core switch for my servers." Many of today's threats to campus network security originate from inside the network. "The Layer 2 Bridge functionality in the NSA E7500 gave us the ability to protect us from ourselves," said McKneely. He now passes third-party-managed student residence network traffic through the NSA E7500, providing confidence that threats or malware are not being brought into the network while providing residential students the same performance and functionality available on the campus network. "In the four-plus years I've been using SonicWALL, I've never had a single technical problem with any device or needed to call support," said McKneely. "I couldn't survive without SonicWALL." To Purchase SonicWALL Products Visit http://www.sonicguard.com |