Assurance on the shore

A safe, secure and fast network

The Brick Township school district has five full-time members on its IT team, in addition to Ellicott – a director; web and help desk personnel; and two building-level technicians. Two part-time employees are available for building-level work as well.

The district connects 3,500 devices, including 1,500 IP phones, across 16 building locations, Ellicott says. In addition, there has been a big increase in staff and students connecting to the network using iPhones and Android mobile devices. Prior to upgrading the school district's internet bandwidth, his team had no choice but to shut down its guest wireless network. What the Brick IT team originally thought would be a few guests, in fact ballooned to more than 500 registered devices. 

Brick, he says, is a large school district trying to help its teachers and students take advantage of interactive and web-based learning technologies and tools. “We needed a solution that could provide our staff and students with a safe, secure and fast network,” he says. 

The search begins

Ellicott and his boss – Leonard Niebo, the director of technology – reviewed a number of solutions to alleviate the congestion on Brick's network. Time was of the essence, so there was not a long evaluation period. The first tool they examined lacked an efficient management interface. One firewall they judged to be less intuitive lacked a full range of features and came with a frustrating technical-support response time.  

After evaluating offerings, they chose the SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewall solution. “Frankly, SonicWALL blows away the other firewall offerings I've seen,” Ellicott says. “We had issues with response time for technical support with our previous firewall provider and we constantly received calls regarding internet lag.”

“SonicWALL products differ by their design philosophy, which is based around a single-pass streaming inspection engine that does not rely on proxies for deep-packet inspection,” says Dmitriy Ayrapetov (left), product line manager of network security at SonicWALL, which has its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, Calif. (Dell acquired the company in March for, it is believed, around $1.2 billion.) 

The district has since deployed paired SonicWALL E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E6500 Next-Generation Firewalls in high availability (HA) mode, running SonicOS 5.8, and bundled with SonicWALL Total-Secure. In addition to freeing up bandwidth to accommodate the increase in users and the amount of data being transmitted, the solution also provides gateway anti-virus, anti-spyware intrusion prevention, application intelligence and control, content filtering, firmware updates and 24/7 support. 

“By not proxying connections, like most other competitors do, we can scan hundreds of thousands of network streams of unlimited size simultaneously without introducing latency through buffering,” says Ayrapetov. This approach is combined with a multicore processor, and that results in a high-performance security engine, he adds.

A critical aspect of the engine is that it can scan everything, regardless of the port, Ayrapetov says. “Pair that power with application intelligence and visualization, and you have a very fast security and application control engine built from the ground up for performance.”

Deployment of the SonicWALL solution went smoothly, says Brick's Ellicott, and he has particular praise for the support team. “We found SonicWALL very easy to work with and responsive,” he says. “When we called with questions, the engineer would return our calls in minutes.”

Plus, the deployment was quick. The Brick school IT team had everything up and running in no time, Ellicott says. Careful planning and documenting the aging firewall's various set of rules and exceptions made the process of switch-over almost seamless.