SonicWALL, Inc. a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced a new version of its proprietary firmware, SonicOS 4.0 Enhanced. This update provides users with easily managed network productivity and protection through new features and configuration flexibility, reducing both risk and administrative burden for IT managers.

With its extensive, centrally manageable and automatically updated functionality, SonicOS 4.0 marks a further step in the company's goal of delivering reduced management and operational costs to businesses of all sizes.

Designed to operate on all SonicWALL firewall appliances, SonicOS 4.0 combines high-performance delivery of Unified Threat Management protection based on SonicWALL's reassembly-free deep packet inspection capabilities, together with multiple new features. These include application firewall, stateful failover with state synchronization, high availability, single sign-on, and inbound load balancing.

"SonicOS 4.0 is a significant milestone, incorporating major security and administrative features," said John Gmuender, vice president of Engineering at SonicWALL. "SonicOS 4.0 enhances the delivery, configuration and customization of constantly updated threat protection services via SonicWALL network security appliances. This marks an important milestone in our ability to deliver high performance threat prevention and protection for businesses of all sizes."

SonicWALL Application Firewall offers users a set of customizable protection tools that prevent data leakage and afford precise control over network traffic. The granular policies enabled by SonicWALL Application Firewall allow custom access control on multiple levels. Capabilities of SonicWALL Application Firewall include inbound and outbound content control, application level access control, deep-packet inspection based bandwidth management, intelligent prevention functionality and digital rights management functionality.

SonicWALL Application Firewall gives users granular control over network traffic using a variety of manageable parameters. The primary functionality of this application layer access control feature is to regulate Web browsing, file transfer, e-mail, and e-mail attachments. Using the digital rights management component of application firewall, administrators have the ability to scan files and documents for content and keywords. Application firewall allows administrators to restrict file transfers of certain file names, file types, e-mail attachments, attachment types, e-mail with certain subjects, and e-mail or attachments with certain keywords or byte patterns.

Stateful Failover is a high availability feature in SonicWALL OS 4.0 that dramatically improves network reliability by ensuring uninterrupted operation in the event of hardware or software failures on the firewall. When Stateful Hardware Failover is enabled between two SonicWALL appliances, the primary appliance actively communicates with the backup to update most connection information. As a result, the backup appliance is always prepared to take over the active connections seamlessly with no detectable interruption to user connections.

The Single Sign-On capabilities in SonicOS provide a transparent user authentication mechanism that provides privileged access to multiple network resources with a single workstation login for Windows domain or workstation users. Inbound Load Balancing allows administrators to configure policies to enable inbound load balancing for network resources. SonicOS 4.0 enables support for the Round Robin, Random Distribution, Sticky IP, Block Remap and Symmetrical Remap load balancing algorithms, as well as TCP and ICMP based probing mechanisms to ensure availability of targets.

SonicWALL's reassembly-free deep packet inspection engine examines every packet of every protocol, across every interface on the network, ensuring that malicious and unproductive communications are eliminated in accordance with the policy needs of the IT Administrator. SonicWALL's dynamic security solutions continuously communicate with the company's worldwide threat prevention databases to provide immediate protection updates, ensuring constant defense vigilance. SonicWALL delivers enterprise-class security to central sites, branch offices, and remote offices through a scalable line of security appliances, which may be controlled by SonicWALL's Global Management System for rapid, effective control of every point of access in the network.

  Additional SonicOS 4.0 Enhanced Feature Highlights:
  --  HTTPS Content Filtering
      This feature allows the SonicWALL to intercept and inspect IP-address
      based HTTPS sessions using the Content Filtering Service (CFS) to
      prevent network users from accessing HTTPS proxy sites and other HTTPS
      content.
  --  SSL Control
      SSL Control provides administrators visibility into the handshake of
      SSL sessions and a method for constructing policies to control the
      establishment of SSL connections.
  --  Services Dashboard
      Services Dashboard provides a visible representation of the current
      global and applicant count of blocked network threats when using the
      SonicWALL Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Intrusion Prevention
      Service.
  --  Enhanced Packet Capture
      Packet capture is a mechanism that allows administrators to capture
      and examine the contents of individual data packets that traverse
      SonicWALL firewall appliances. This information aids administrators in
      troubleshooting, diagnostics and general network activity, decreasing
      the time it take to investigate potential issues.
  --  Virtual Access Points
      Virtual Access Points enables SonicPoints to advertise up to eight
      SSIDs and allows each to be associated with a Security Zone.
  --  Wireless IDS Rogue Detection
      Wireless IDS Rogue Detection allows you to configure a set of
      authorized access points, defined by address object groups. If contact
      is attempted from an unauthorized access point, SonicOS generates an
      alert.
  --  DHCP options
      Allows vendor specific DHCP options to be used in conjunction with
      DHCP leases
  --  MS-CHAP-V2 Support
      Added support for MS-CHAP-V2 for L2TP over IPsec remote access
      connections.
  --  Multiple Administrator support
      Allows for multiple concurrent administrative sessions, including
      support for non-config mode sessions and read only access to the
      SonicWALL management interface.

  About SonicWALL, Inc.

SonicWALL is committed to improving the performance and productivity of businesses of all sizes by engineering the cost and complexity out of running a secure network. Over one million SonicWALL appliances have been shipped through its global network of ten thousand channel partners to keep tens of millions of worldwide business computer users safe and in control of their data. SonicWALL's award-winning solutions include network security, secure remote access, content security, backup and recovery, and policy and management technology.