NETGEAR UTM50EW3-100NAS 40000 Simultaneous Sessions 400 Mbps ProSecure UTM50 Appliance with 3-year Subscription Bundle Web, Email, and Support & Maintenance Subscriptions – Unlimited Users NETGEAR UTM50EW3-100NAS 40000 Simultaneous Sessions 400 Mbps ProSecure UTM50 Appliance with 3-year Subscription Bundle Web, Email, and Support & Maintenance Subscriptions – Unlimited Users

Pros: Decent at stopping malware from being downloaded. Can remove may of the constant spamming of ads on webpages and can block use of social networking sites if desired.

The power supply is internal. No need to have a mess of external power dongles.

Allows firewall rules to filter traffic between VLANs in addition to the usual rules of LAN/WAN or into and out of the DMZ.

After some tweaking it works with the native VPN client included with iOS(iPhone/iPad) and Mac OSX with no additional software needing to be installed. Windows clients have the option of using SSL/VPN which requires and ActiveX control to be installed or use of Netgear's VPN client software of which you get a few licenses of included in the box.

Cons: Even through this is one of the higher end UTM boxes from Netgear, the device is still under powered for what it does. Turning on all the features makes for a very slow connection so you have to find a good mix. It can have issues with HD content such as YouTube, but you can add an exception for sites that you trust so that those sites work faster.

PPTP and L2CP support is a joke. It only works under very limited situations and configurations.

Other Thoughts: This is a very typical commercial/business product from Netgear for those who have bought other Netgear products. The price is very low and puts the technology in reach of those that wouldn't be able to get it due to cost reasons. But at the same time the product firmware has alot of quirks or things that either don't work correctly or don't work the way you would expect them to. Reliability is also an issue.

Don't expect to rely on technical support. Technical support like it is for many companies is a waste of time. The web is a much better source of information.

Finally, I think despite what I just said I would buy the product again since it's doing something that would be hard to get otherwise in this price range.

Pros: Excellent cost effective solution.Highly configurable to match needs. Strong construction and robust.

Cons: These units require some tricks on setup.Use Trial license, do not input license key supplied with product just yet. 1.3.7.0 firmware update install, reboot, then factory default. Again, use trial registration license, and upgrade to latest firmware. Reboot, reset to factory defaults one more time. Now insert your license key and configure the device. Settings should stick now. Update your patterns and signatures. This is a time consuming process and one of the cons of this unit. After this is done the unit is solid and dependable. The Firnware trick is what I have done with three of these UTM50's and one UTM150. I wouldn't use the UTM50 for an office of more than 20 users. With streaming antivir and other options enabled you are looking at around 18mb/sec throughput from WAN to LAN under less than 15% cpu load. Netgear support is helpful if you need them, but the fact remains these units require initial setup attention and time.

Other Thoughts: I had initially purchased a competing brand that was around $5,000. It did NOT meet expectations and in reality no faster than the UTM50. It was also extremely hard to configure and work with. I returned it and in return chose a UTM50 and a UTM150. I've been hooked on these devices ever since. The weaknesses are small in number on this unit. Minor things like not being able to set SPAM mails to DELETE instead of pasting a label. Some sites are also misclassified in the content filtering. Luckily the Netgear misclassification system seems to work well. Spend the extra time with these units in initial setup, run them in your back office under test conditions for a week and learn the ins and outs of these sleeper units. They are outstanding once you learn their secrets and have saved me countless headaches and fixed all sorts of problems I was having with users going to shady sites and getting infections daily.