 Re: UTM-1 M450 Appliance
I was at a conference yesterday where CP discussed these new boxes a bit. There were a couple of interesting items:
They are hard drive based with a single drive, but HA is available. They are running a slightly modified version of SPLAT.
They can be self-managed, or can manage other UTM boxes or can be managed by a SmartCenter.
If you factor in the cost of buying hardware plus the regular CP license, one of these boxes is priced the same as just the software license. The claim was that you get the hardware for free, however I doubt many people pay the full list price for the CP software. If these boxes get discounted as much as the software can, they do look attractive.
Very interesting was the licensing. They are not licensed by a hard number of users. Rather the different models have specs attached saying how many users are recommended. For example, a 250-user sized unit can be used with 1,000 users behind it without violating the license terms.
I don't remember the exact throughput specs, but they looked realistic. They had one spec of "all SmartDefense & Web App enabled" which is what I would take as a realistic way of presenting it.
The confusing part to me is just how these boxes are being positioned. It looks like the solid-state Edge's are being positioned for the smaller offices and protection of industrial networks (process control, etc.), these UTM boxes are being positioned for mid-sized locations, and "real" installations are for the main office.
But without a license limit restriction on the UTM boxes, they could easily replace the full-blown "Power" boxes unless you need gobs of bandwidth.
Ray  |