Check Point 2210 Appliance review

Check Point's new 2200 Appliances combined enterprise level network security with an SMB price tag. Its software blades provide a wealth of features, but do they complicate deployment? Read this exclusive review to find out.

Aimed at SMBs and remote office deployments, the new 2200 family of security appliances stand out as they are available with all the same software blades as Check Point's enterprise appliances. This makes them very easy to customise as you just pick the blade package that suits your current needs and upgrade as your needs change.

In this exclusive review we look at the 2210 model which comes with all ten security software blades. The list starts with Check Point's well respected SPI firewall and includes IPsec VPNs, clustering, identity awareness and mobile access security plus a one year subscription to IPS, application control, URL filtering, anti-virus and anti-spam.

Two extra blades are included as standard with all 2200 appliances - security policy management and logging. If you don't want all these features you can start with the entry-level 2205 model which costs around 2,300 and comes with the firewall, IPsec VPN, clustering, identity awareness and mobile access security blades.

This compact appliance has six Gigabit Ethernet ports that can be configured for LAN, WAN or DMZ duties as required. It uses a small internal fan but, unlike Fortinet's noisy 111C appliance, it's virtually silent.

Your first port of call is the appliance's web console which provides a handy wizard that runs through network configuration, setting up your internal and external ports and securing administrative access. The appliance has a 250GB hard disk and this can be used to store system images for backing up and restoring various configurations.