We found we needed a couple of appliances in there to serve our smaller customers, senior product marketing manager Bill Hansey said.
The company said the new mid-tier Firebox V60L will be available next week. The L is for limited – it’s a scaled-back version of the V60 that can be upgraded with a software key in the event that a buyer outgrows its scalability.
The V60L can handle half as much throughput as its big brother, which offers some 50Mbps VPN and 100Mbps firewall. The VPN part of the product can support up to 50 site-to-site VPN tunnels and 100 remote user tunnels, versus 400 for both types on the V60.
Hansey said the release fills an obvious hole in WatchGuard’s line-up, and that it was designed to directly compete with NetScreen Technologies Inc’s NetScreen 25 (though the V60L has higher VPN performance and costs $500 more).
Right at the bottom end of WatchGuard’s catalog, the new Firebox 500 is a standalone device aimed at companies with one office and 10 to 250 employees, up to 50 of which can be remote VPN users.
The appliance, positioned against SonicWALL Inc’s PRO 100 and Cisco Systems Inc’s Pix 506E, has throughput of 75Mbps firewall throughput and has the option of a mobile user VPN but does not support site-to-site VPN tunneling.
The Firebox 500 comes with logging and web URL filtering as standard, and will ship with a recommended retail price of $1,790, and the Firebox V60L will have a recommended price of $3,990 (the V60 is $5,990).
WatchGuard said recently it will push into the higher end this year, so more product launches in the V-Class and high-end RapidStream product lines are likely.
Source: Computerwire
