• Astaro Security Appliance

Astaro Security Gateway Essentials The Essential Firewall edition is a free version of the Astaro Security Gateway and offers fundamental security functions to help protect any business network. Implement a free firewall without charge and no strings attached.

An Astaro Security Gateway provides immediate protection for your network, web access and email traffic. The Astaro solution integrates more security applications than any competitor in one award-winning management device. A complete range of hardware appliances scale to the performance level that you demand. Over 100,000 IT security experts in 60 countries entrust their network with Astaro's Unified Threat Management solutions.

What do you need to know about free software?

• Pros

  Easy to deploy and manage. Includes all critical security services. Excellent reporting. Scalable.

• Cons

  Multiple network services—single point of failure.

• Bottom Line

  The Astaro Security Gateway 220 is a well-rounded and easy-to-manage appliance that should definitely be considered if you're in the market for a multifunction gateway security solution.

Earlier this year, Astaro introduced a new line of multifunction security appliances—the Astaro Security Gateway 110, 120, 220, and 320—designed for everyone from small businesses to large enterprises. The appliances, which differ in the number of users supported and in the available throughput for the VPN (Virtual Private Network) and firewall, integrate an upgraded version of the company's Editors' Choice–winning threat-management software, Astaro Security Linux.

PC Magazine Labs got its hands on one of the new security appliances, the Security Gateway 220, which is intended for small- and medium-size businesses. We put it through some rigorous testing, and we were extremely impressed with this relatively new hardware solution.

The Security Gateway 220 is a medium-size appliance that supports an unlimited number of users, with throughput of up to 280 Mbps on the firewall and up to 105 Mbps for the VPN. Especially appealing features are its eight 100-Mbps Ethernet ports, a 1.2-GHz Pentium III processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive, which should provide plenty of space for all log file and reporting data.

We reviewed Astaro's software solution, Astaro Security Linux version 5, for the first time in November 2004, and we liked the interface's ease of use and attention to detail. In fact, the ASL software resolved many of the gripes we had with the multifunction security appliances in our March 2003 roundup, such as quarantine queues that could not be sorted or searched, and missing IDS (Intrusion Detection). The Security Gateway 220 is based on the same software and has all the features that impressed us.

Built on a mix of open-source and commercial components, the firmware provides six pillars of security for the network: a firewall, antivirus (AV), intrusion protection, content filtering, spam protection, and a VPN gateway. The full-featured firewall supports Network Address Translation (NAT), including source/destination NAT, IP masquerading, and load balancing. It provides very granular intrusion detection, with the ability to block suspect traffic. We like that the 2,000-plus rules are grouped in service categories, and that administrators can observe which rules are being triggered by violations—very helpful in troubleshooting bad traffic. The firmware includes several proxy servers, among them an HTTP cache proxy, a SOCKS proxy, and an SMTP relay with antispam and AV.

Version 5.2 of the firmware adds spyware protection, blocking both incoming spyware and adware, and preventing malicious programs from sending confidential information outside of your network. The full-featured VPN endpoint allows for in-depth configuration and full control over policies, keys, and certificate-authority management. Even L2TP over IPSec is supported.

The Astaro 220's logging and reporting sections are equally outstanding and offer querying, searching, sorting, and live log views. Armin van buuren a state of trance 437 download itunes. We especially like that the proxy queue, which holds questionable e-mails, can be searched by the sender or the receiver, or by using other free-form configurable strings to track down a message that might have been caught erroneously; it can also just identify specific content. In addition, the administrator can configure the system to send a daily spam digest to all users with valid e-mail addresses. This is a great feature, since users will otherwise rarely become aware of e-mails that have been withheld.

For larger installations, Astaro also offers the Astaro Report Manager Enterprise Edition for an additional fee. In addition to accessing and consolidating data from other security-product vendors, it combines data from multiple Astaro Security Linux installations. And the Configuration Manager, an optional object-oriented policy-management tool, allows administrators to configure Astaro gateway appliances at remote sites.

The Astaro Security Gateway 220's other noteworthy features include the ability to update its firmware and signature files for AV and intrusion detection automatically. The appliance can send encrypted backups of its configuration files to the administrator on a set schedule. It also supports remote syslog and accounting, and includes Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server capabilities. Remote management and user authentication against RADIUS, SAM, AD, or LDAP are further indications that the Astaro Security Gateway 220 is an extremely well-rounded, capable, and powerful product.

For smaller enterprises, Astaro has the 110 and the 120, which offer support for ten or unlimited users, respectively, but with slower throughput—80 Mbps for the firewall and 26 Mbps for the VPN. Though this should be plenty for businesses with fewer than 25 users, those looking to expand their network in the near future would be better served by the 220. Should you have greater performance needs (especially gigabit support on your LAN), Astaro offers the 320, which provides greater throughput across the board.

Any administrator who is planning to buy a gateway security appliance should check out the Security Gateway 220 and consider it strongly.

Astaro Security Appliance

Astaro Security Gateway 220

Bottom Line: The Astaro Security Gateway 220 is a well-rounded and easy-to-manage appliance that should definitely be considered if you're in the market for a multifunction gateway security solution.