WatchGuard Technologies, a leader in small office/home office firewall/VPN appliances, is targeting the big boys with a high-end device aimed squarely at Cisco's PIX 535 and NetScreen Technologies' NetScreen-5200. On the plus side, the $60,000 device is a lot less expensive than competing products from Cisco, NetScreen or Nokia, and its management graphical user interface will be familiar to users of other WatchGuard products. And in our tests, WatchGuard's V200 set up an impressive 42,000 concurrent IP Security (IPSec) tunnels, a useful capability when dealing with huge numbers of dial-up users in an corporate setting. But on the minus side, the latest beta unit bore out the adage that security always comes with a performance cost. Even with a much-reduced number of IPSec tunnels in place, the V200's latency and throughput were much degraded compared with its performance when configured as a firewall.
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