Some month’s ago my cheap Thomson WLAN VOIP router, which I got from my ISP, just stopped working and I needed something stable and secure. I searched a lot, read a lot of reviews until I found the ISA550W from Cisco. It had everything which I needed:
- Gigabit Ethernet
- 802.11b/g/n WLAN
- Integrated security appliance (ISA)
And it didn’t cost that much (around 360$) like a real business hardware firewall (1000$ +). There is also the greater brother of the ISA550W the ISA 570W, which just has better performance, more ports and throughput than the ISA550W, but for me the throughput was enough. Ok here now the specifications:
- Firewall Throughput 200 Mbps
- IPsec VPN Throughput 75 Mbps
- Anti-virus Throughput 50 Mbps
- IPS Throughput 60 Mbps
- UTM Throughput 45 Mbps
- Maximum Connections 15000
- IPsec VPN Site-to-Site Tunnels 25
- IPsec Remote Access Tunnels 10
- SSL VPN Tunnels 10
- Total Interface 7 GE
- WAN Interface 2 GE
- LAN Interface 6 GE
- WLAN (802.11b/g/n) yes
- DMZ Port Up to four
The detailed specs you can get here and the full administration guide here.
So I bought it right away and started configuring. First of all I must say that you can configure nearly everything you can imagine. (Especially when you are used to a silly Thomson router admin interface)
I didn’t had any problems yet with this router, but the only annoying thing is, that the security updates are just valid for one year, and then you need to renew the subscription to get updates for the anti-virus, IPS etc.
Today I use the IPsec VPN, anti-virus, IPS and the standard network configs for WLAN, port forwarding etc. which all works flawlessly. I can recommend you this router if you want something secure and stable.
I hope some of you helped this little review.
Cheers,
Guy