SonicWALL, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNWL), today announced the availability of its SonicOS 3.0 operating system, which delivers advanced features across all SonicWALL TZ 170 and PRO Series appliances, enabling businesses of all sizes to take advantage of affordable, enterprise-class network security.

SonicOS 3.0 combines unified threat management features such as Gateway Anti-virus and intrusion detection and prevention with stateful inspection firewall and other enterprise-class features such as VLAN support, dynamic routing, Active Directory user authentication, and secure remote management capabilities.

SonicOS 3.0's 802.1q VLAN capabilities enable network administrators to deploy firewall, anti-virus and intrusion prevention at any point of the network including distribution, aggregation, core and gateway layers. With SonicOS 3.0, network security is no longer limited to physical ports on the firewall but is extended to the port density of managed switches. User and group policies can be deployed to secure mobile users as they access network resources from a variety of devices, while consolidated user management for local and remote access and policy enforcement increases security while decreasing administration costs.

As one of its defining features, SonicOS 3.0 enables SonicWALL's intelligent, real-time Gateway Anti-Virus service, which is capable of concurrent scanning of large numbers of files as well as files of unlimited size. Gateway Anti-Virus provides support for multiple protocol types, scanning not only email traffic but all network transfers, delivering real-time virus protection for file, mail, Web and FTP servers. Combined with SonicWALL's Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS) 2.0, Gateway Anti-Virus provides powerful unified threat management to businesses of all sizes.

"The introduction of SonicOS 3.0 brings powerful new capabilities to our entire installed base of TZ 170 and PRO series users, without forcing a hardware upgrade," said Matthew Medeiros, president and chief executive officer at SonicWALL. "Two years ago, firewalls were able to prevent about 30 basic network attacks. Today, SonicOS 3.0 and our unified threat management offering allow SonicWALL to prevent some 30,000 dynamic threats covering both file and network-based propagation of blended attacks. This is an industry-leading capability that is affordable and easy to deploy and represents another compelling reason to deploy SonicWALL appliances."

SonicOS 3.0 and Gateway Anti-Virus will be available across SonicWALL's entire TZ 170 series and PRO series product lines, supported by a subscription service for signature updates. SonicOS 3.0 Standard is now available, and SonicOS 3.0 Enhanced will be available on December 15, 2004.

Features of SonicWALL's SonicOS 3.0 operating system include:

Unified Threat Management

- Real-Time Gateway Anti-Virus: Provides per packet virus scanning using IDPv2 engine with 25,000 signatures on the PRO Series platform, and 4,500 signatures on the TZ 170 Series platform. Capable of scanning HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, FTP and of generic TCP streams, with support for zip and gzip compression.

- IDP version 2.0 Engine: Provides Global IP Exclusion list, syn flood, configurable User/Group/Schedule controls, IP Fragmentation validation and reassembly, IP/ICMP/TCP/UDP checksum validation, log redundancy controls per category.

- Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) Spam Blocking: Provides the ability to use DNS to query RBL services that track well-known spam and open-relay SMTP servers, and to deny SMTP connections from servers that appear on the lists.

Dynamic Routing/VLAN

- 802.1q Virtual LANs: Provides support for 802.1q VLANs using virtual interfaces with VLAN ID tag assignments. Virtual interfaces provide many of the same features as physical interfaces, including Zone assignment, DHCP Server, and NAT and Access Rule controls.

- Dynamic DNS (Domain Name Service): Provides the ability for the SonicWALL to dynamically register its WAN IP address with a specified DDNS provider. Also provides support for all services offered by four dynamic DNS providers: dyndns.org, yi.org, no-ip.com, and changeip.com.

- Real-Time Monitoring: CPU Monitor provides aggregate CPU utilisation reports with histograms. Process Monitor shows running processes with current and total processor utilisation values. Connection Monitor shows all connections through and to the SonicWALL device with all layer 3 and layer 4 details.

- Static ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)
Provides the ability to create static ARP entries, to create MAC to IP bindings, and to publish static ARP entries for use in secondary subnet support.

Enhanced Distributed Wireless Services

- Lightweight HotSpot Messaging: Provides broad support for external authentication backend systems for wireless hotspot services.

- WiFiSec Exception List: Flexible control of services that can bypass WiFiSec enforcement. Can be configured, for example, to allow NT Domain logons to occur prior to GVC tunnel establishment.

About SonicWALL, Inc.
SonicWALL, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated network security, mobility, and productivity solutions for the SMB, enterprise, e-commerce, education, healthcare, retail/point-of-sale, and government markets. Core technologies include firewall, VPN, wireless, real time gateway anti-virus, spyware protection, spam blocking, intrusion detection and prevention, SSL, desktop anti-virus, content filtering, VLAN, and dynamic routing along with award-winning security management solutions. Together, these products and technologies provide the most comprehensive distributed enforcement architecture available. SonicWALL, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. SonicWALL trades on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol SNWL. For more information, contact SonicWALL at 90 or visit the company Web site at http://www.sonicwall.com.