Netgear ProSecure UTM 150 appliance review

Easy to manage network protection at a fair price

Best known for small business networking and security products, Netgear has extended its family of ProSecure UTM (Unified Threat Management) appliances to address the needs of the much larger mid-range market. In particular it has added 50- and 150-user models, unsurprisingly called the UTM50 and UTM150, designed to compete against similar products from companies such as Cisco, SonicWALL and WatchGuard.

For our evaluation we concentrated on the Netgear UTM 150, which is pretty conventional in terms of hardware. It's about the size of a rack-mount switch housed in an all-metal 1U case complete with brackets for mounting, although it can equally be placed on or even under a desk.

Power is provided via a built-in supply with a couple of cooling fans that emit a continuous low hum. It's okay in a separate room, but could be a nuisance in an open plan office.

The various interfaces and status LEDs are all located at the front, with four Gigabit Ethernet LAN connectors plus four more for internet WAN connectivity. There's also a USB port but this is apparently for future enhancements and isn't used for anything at the moment. Neither is there any real need for the serial management port at the back.

Designed to sit between the internet and the local network, the four WAN connectors allow the appliance to be used with multiple ISP services, and provides for load balancing and automatic failover. For our tests, however, we used just one, plugging in an Ethernet lead from the back of a 40Mbit/s BT Infinity broadband modem.

Netgear reckons it takes less than 30 minutes to configure one of its UTM appliances, a claim borne out during our tests. In fact it took no more than 10 minutes to get the UTM 150 configured on our test network, although a fair degree of technical knowledge is assumed.

Moreover, if you want to do more than just take the default settings, you should expect to devote a lot longer to the task.

Netgear ProSecure UTM 150 appliance review

Easy to manage network protection at a fair price

Having connected our broadband modem, we powered up the appliance and attached a PC to one of the LAN ports to enable us to run through the initial set-up routine. To do that we simply pointed a browser at the default IP address (found in the slim quick set-up guide), logged on using the default name and password (also in the guide), and then navigated to the set-up wizard to get the appliance configured.

The 10-step wizard was very easy to follow and started out by correctly identifying our PPoE BT Infinity service, leaving us to simply provide the username required for access. On the LAN side we took the default option to configure the Netgear box to act as a NAT router, using DHCP to assign addresses. This enabled us to deploy the UTM 150 in place of our BT-supplied broadband router, albeit without any wireless capabilities.

Next we were asked which services to enable, with options here to scan email (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP) and web (HTTP, HTTPS and FTP) traffic for malware.

The ability to filter web as well as email traffic is one of the big selling points of the Netgear UTM, using a mix of Sophos anti-virus, Commtouch URL filtering and Mailshell anti-spam technologies to provide enterprise-quality malware detection using what the company calls 'stream scanning' technology.

A kind of parallel processing approach to malware filtering, stream scanning, according to Netgear, is up to five times faster than competitive systems. Netgear claims that it has only minimal effects on latency, and we certainly didn't notice any significant delays while web browsing or running hosted web applications during our tests.

Spam protection is another built-in option, using a combination of local and cloud-based classification. Suspect messages can be blocked and attachments stripped off but, with no local storage on the appliance, there's no option to quarantine messages and allow users to sort out the false positives.

Lastly it's possible to block the use of a variety of instant messaging systems, including MSN and Yahoo Messenger, as well as prevent the use of popular P2P file-sharing services such as BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella.

Netgear ProSecure UTM 150 appliance review

Easy to manage network protection at a fair price

Having worked our way through the set-up wizard the unit was re-booted, after which it started to filter traffic straight away. Attempts to download Eicar and other test viruses were blocked as expected, and we were able to block access to web sites based on pre-set categories chosen via the management interface. Commonly used blacklists can also be deployed along with custom white lists, but configuring these takes a lot longer and we doubt that many companies will use this option other than to handle the odd exception.

The ability to authenticate users, integrate with Active Directory and apply policies per user or group of users is another very useful feature. We also liked the option to display custom warning messages when web sites were blocked, email attachments deleted and so on, although formatting of these messages could be made easier.

Of course you also get a stateful inspection firewall with the usual tools to configure custom rules, forward traffic on specific ports and configure one of the LAN interfaces as a de-militarised zone. Maximum throughput across this firewall is 900Mbit/s on the UTM150, with an average 130Mbit/s throughput when the anti-virus scanner is in use.

Up to 255 virtual LANs can be set up on the UTM 150, and there's good support too for VPN remote access using either IPsec or SSL encryption. Up to 150 simultaneous VPN tunnels can be configured (the limit for SSL is 75) with support for site-to-site and site-to-client tunnelling, with additional wizards to configure both options. IPsec client software is also included, licensed for just three users although you can get around that by using the VPN clients built into Windows and Mac operating systems.

On the management front the GUI seemed a little old-fashioned, but it was easy enough to navigate with dashboard displays to show the status and a number of reports to keep on top of what was happening. Email alerting is also supported and, for the technically minded, there are plenty of well-documented opportunities to tweak and further fine-tune the way the Netgear appliance works.

In-depth interaction isn't mandatory, however, and we were impressed with the level of protection afforded simply by taking the defaults. Moreover, the ProSecure UTM 150 offers big-company network protection in an easy to manage format that won't break the bank. You will have to budget for subscription updates, but these are affordable with a choice of plans starting at £700 + VAT for one year, with two- and three-year subscriptions also available.

And finally, it's worth noting that, although nominally rated for up to 150 users, there are no hard and fast limits and no per-user fees, making the ProSecure UTM 150 something of a bargain.