SonicWALL Customers Embrace Next-Generation Security Solutions

LAS VEGAS and SAN JOSE, Calif., May 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- INTEROP -- SonicWALL, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent network security and data protection solutions, today confirmed that next-generation firewall (NGFW) adoption in its customer base is accelerating, especially in academia and retail deployments. The company has seen significant demand for its high-performance, network security solutions running the new SonicOS 5.8 with application intelligence, control and visualization features. Large deployment examples include SUNY Old Westbury and Hall County Schools, Berry College and BGMX Retail Solutions. The campus education deployments each protect thousands of students, faculty and administrators from malware and intrusions while also managing bandwidth for critical applications. Visualization tools enable IT administrators to monitor traffic in real-time and respond to changing network needs immediately through easy to configure application policy rules.  

SonicWALL's customers benefit from the industry-leading application intelligence, control and visualization solution, that puts the power back in the hands of IT administrators with new levels of management and ease-of-use. It enables IT managers to block or throttle application usage on a user or group level, optimize bandwidth consumption facilitating an increase in employee productivity. SonicWALL's enterprise-class customers benefit in particular from the patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection™ (RFDPI) technology that enables increased security without network latency.

"Large campuses and distributed retail locations have one thing in common. They need to stay secure and ensure that critical applications get the bandwidth they need, while limiting the bandwidth that unessential applications consume," said Patrick Sweeney, vice president of product management and corporate marketing at SonicWALL. "Having the ability to get granular with application control and scan every byte of every packet with full content inspection of the entire stream has become invaluable to our customers looking to improve security and deploy application intelligence."

SonicWALL security solutions have recently been deployed with the following customers:

Hall County Schools

Hall County Schools is a public school district in Hall County, Georgia. Based in Gainesville, the district employs 4,800 teachers and staff members, supporting 26,000 students attending 21 elementary schools, six middle schools, and seven high schools. Previously, the district had deployed a competitor's solution for firewalls and content filtering. Over time, however, the district became increasingly dissatisfied with these solutions. In addition to content filtering and ease-of-management, the district sought robust monitoring and reporting, single sign-on (SSO) and CIPA compliance. Hall County Schools evaluated filtering solutions from multiple vendors before purchasing an integrated SonicWALL® E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E7500 solution from its Dell reseller.

"We want to be able to allocate more bandwidth for high schools than elementary schools, for example," said C. J. Daab, technology support coordinator at Hall County Schools. "Prioritizing application traffic will help us better manage application traffic between students and social networking sites like Facebook. This will be a big benefit for us going forward as we take on more latency-sensitive traffic, such as VoIP and LifeSize® video conferencing."

State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury

SUNY College at Old Westbury employs over 250 faculty members and 300 non-faculty staff, and serves over 4,300 students, a quarter of whom reside on campus. The college required a reliable and transparent security solution to eliminate external attempts to steal personal and financial information. It also needed to prevent student and faculty devices being used to launch malicious attacks. Additionally, the SUNY experienced an increase in demand for network bandwidth, which stressed existing legacy hardware beyond its technical capabilities and architecture. With the SonicWALL Network Security Appliance (NSA) E7500, the college increased traffic transparency, optimized bandwidth management, and experienced higher service levels and user satisfaction, plus greater system reliability.

"With a large diverse group of faculty and students using both incoming and outgoing information, it can be difficult to regulate bandwidth," said Marc Seybold, CIO at SUNY College at Old Westbury. "The SonicWALL NSA E7500 allows us to be proactive and actually look at how the available bandwidth is being used over different time slices during the day, by user, and then optimize it."

Berry College

Founded in 1902 near Rome, Georgia, Berry College is an independent, coeducational college with approximately 1,850 students and about 600 faculty and staff members. The College experienced extreme growth on its network in just three years with the upsurge in streaming video, game consoles, DVD players, smartphones and tablets on campus. This rapid growth meant the college needed to re-evaluate its bandwidth capabilities and implement an enterprise-class solution to give it more control over the applications on the network. Berry College selected the SonicWALL Network Security Appliance (NSA) E6500 based on its ability to deliver granular insight into application control to help manage increased network demand.

"SonicWALL lets me see all the way down to whether someone is watching a show on Hulu, or transferring a lot of files over IM and that's a huge improvement over the visibility we used to have," said Dan Boyd, senior network architect at Berry College. "The visualization capabilities into application traffic has really helped us prioritize bandwidth and take control of our network."

BGMX Retail Solutions

BGMX Retail Solutions provides a fully integrated services platform and support network for approximately 70 regional operators, small chains, and independent retailers in the grocery and convenience store sectors. BGMX manages VMWare® servers and networking facilities to host Midax® Point-of-Sales (POS) solutions, and uses TrustWave® scanning solutions to help its customers comply with PCI-DSS and SAS-70 requirements. Because security and reliability are critical for BGMX customers, it selected the SonicWALL Network Security Appliance (NSA) 3500 for its easy configuration, PCI compliance options and ability to gain real-time granular visualization into network application traffic.

"We looked at a few other options in our search for stronger security but could not find anything that compared to the ease of deployment, management and visualization into applications the SonicWALL NSA 3500 is able provide," said Erin Desko, CTO at BGMX Retail Solutions. "PCI compliance is crucial to our business and having it come basically straight out of the box has been invaluable for us."

SonicWALL recently introduced a massively scalable product line that meets the needs of the largest campus, retail and central site networks in the world. The SonicWALL SuperMassive E10000 Series of Next-Generation Firewalls delivers more than 40 Gbps of firewall throughput and over 30 Gbps of application control and Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS). SonicWALL SuperMassive further expands SonicWALL's next-generation firewall offerings for the enterprise and is an attractive choice for existing and future customers.

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About SonicWALL, Inc.

Guided by its vision of Dynamic Security for the Global Network, SonicWALL develops advanced intelligent network security and data protection solutions that adapt as organizations evolve and as threats evolve. Trusted by small and large enterprises worldwide, SonicWALL solutions are designed to detect and control applications and protect networks from intrusions and malware attacks through award-winning hardware, software and virtual appliance-based solutions. For more information, visit http://www.sonicwall.com/.

Copyright © 2011 SonicWALL, Inc. All rights reserved. SONICWALL® is a registered trademark of SonicWALL, Inc. and all other SonicWALL product and service names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of SonicWALL, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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Patrick Sweeney

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John Gmuender

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Matt Medeiros

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SOURCE SonicWALL, Inc.