Review: Pro 2040

For: The bundled security services - such as stateful inspection firewall, anti-virus, strong authentication, content filtering and VPN termination - make the product ideal for organisations with small budgets or minimal IT support staff.
Against: The Pro 2040 only provides services for the SonicWall SonicPoint devices, as well as the TZ-170 device.
Verdict: Great for small to medium-sized organisations.

The Pro 2040 allows for configuration and management of SonicWall SonicPoints. This device provides simple management of the wireless access point by only requiring a small number of wireless configuration settings.

The management of SonicPoint devices uses HTTP and SSL connections to the management interface that resides on the Pro 2040. Each SonicPoint is added to one of a configurable number of SonicPoint groups. These groups provide the configuration settings that the SonicPoint access point will use.

The Pro 2040 was able to detect rogue access points. The options included with the Wireless IPS component of the Pro 2040 was a bit underwhelming, but the features included are very easy to administer.

Setting up the SonicWall Pro 2040 hardware was a breeze and there was no need to use any command line interface since almost every option is available through the web interface. The most challenging part of the SonicWall installation is the registration and firmware upgrade.

SonicWall has outstanding documentation, mostly available from the website, which features demonstrations and configurations for common environments in a Flash-like environment.

The support options for the SonicWall device are standard for what is seen in the industry. Options include 8-5 and 24/7 email and phone support.

SonicWall Pro 2040 is at the low end of the price spectrum for products tested in this review. When combined with the larger number of features, it appears to be a great solution for the small- to medium-sized enterprise market.

managementsecuritywireless