Cyberoam CR1000iNG-XP review

Reporting included

Cyberoam commendably includes full reporting in the price. The embedded iView syslog server stores all logs on the internal hard disk and presents it in a separate interface accessed directly from the appliance's web console.

It provides impressive levels of information with the dashboard showing graphs of all allowed and denied traffic. Clicking on a bar graph provides a complete breakdown of all traffic types presented as a collection of pie charts.

It provides details on firewall, virus and spam activity, web content filtering and even search engine criteria being entered. Compliance reports for HIPAA, PCI or SoX are included and we could easily see what our users had been up to by entering their names in the web surfing report search page.

Conclusion

With the appliance and a 1-year TVS subscription costing less than 20K, the CR1000iNG-XP represents remarkably good value. SonicWALL's NSA E8500, for example, offers a much lower raw firewall throughput of 8Gbps and yet prices for this appliance start at 25K.

The CR1000iNG-XP delivers an impressive range of security measures along with versatile identity-based policies. Cyberoam's total OS consistency across all of its appliances makes deployment and future upgrades a simple process and value looks even better as reporting is included in the price.

Verdict

The CR1000iNG-XP offers mid-sized businesses high performance network security at a sensible price. Easy to deploy and packed with features, it can also be easily expanded to keep in step with demand

Chassis: 2U rack

CPU: 2 x 2GHz E5-2620 Xeon

Memory: 6GB DDR3

Network: 10 x Gigabit (max 42)

Storage: 4GB CompactFlash, 1TB SATA hard disk

Expansion: 4 x module slots

Power: 2 x hot-plug 500W PSUs

Ports: 2 x USB, RJ-45 console

Management: Web browser, iView

Module options: 8 x copper Gigabit, £923; 8 x SFP Gigabit, £1,352, 4 x 10GbE SFP+, £2,140 (all ex VAT)