NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: NEAL WEINBERG on
PRODUCT REVIEWS
01/15/02
Today's focus: NetScreen Global Pro 3

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* NetScreen firewall management suite offers strong policy-
based security
* Links related to Network World product reviews
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: NetScreen Global Pro 3

By Neal Weinberg

The Reviewmeister has been looking for a good tool to manage
multiple firewalls, so we checked out NetScreen's revamped
Global Pro 3.0 management suite.

Released in November, Global Pro 3.0 takes network executives
out of the tedious position of managing individual firewalls,
and moves them into the realm of policy-based security
management.

Before now, NetScreen had fallen behind competitors such as
Check Point, Avaya and Nokia because it didn't offer
centralized policy-based configuration.

Global Pro 3.0 comes in two flavors. The Express version, which
we evaluated, can manage up to 100 devices. This version lacks
some of the aggregate reporting tools available in the higher
end full version, which scales up to 10,000 devices, sports an
Oracle database back-end and offers some fault tolerance.

For the Global Pro Express 3.0, you get quite a bit of
management machinery for $6,000. It comes standard on a
dedicated Sun server with a 500-MHz Sun Netra T-1 processor
with 512M bytes of RAM.

To install Global Pro Express 3.0, hook up a terminal and give
it an IP address. The management server comes pre-built with a
firewall and can be placed anywhere inside your network.

Management is controlled from any Windows NT 4.0 or Windows
2000 system. The Management Server has a small Web server
installed, largely to feed Windows the Java-based management
graphical user interface that communicates with the management
server.

Security policies are key to Global Pro 3.0. There are 13 types
of security policies, ranging from the prosaic (such as where
to send SYSLOG messages) to the critical (such as what traffic
gets in and what traffic does not). Policies are defined using
a simple interface and can then be applied to as many firewalls
or firewall groups as you'd like.

We defined a policy listing all our corporate mail servers and
stating that the Internet could connect to our corporate mail
servers, but only for the purpose of sending us mail.

The beautiful thing about NetScreen's policy-based management
is that if a new firewall is added into one of the groups
already attached to the policy, Global Pro 3.0 automatically
builds a policy for it that includes all the policies for that
group. The same is true of changes to the policy. If a new mail
server is added, all it takes is a push to all firewalls to
make them aware of the change in policy.

Features like real-time monitoring and alerting are built into
the product, as is a powerful set of delegated management
functions. With the ability to partition the management
function across multiple servers, NetScreen's architecture
looks as if it can scale to thousands of firewalls.

Global Pro 3.0 could go a lot further in showing the big
picture of your network, however. Global Pro 3.0 has a summary
report that gives you a partial view of the enterprise firewall
configuration, but the report was not as complete as we wanted.

NetScreen still has some work to do on Global Pro. Still, it's
an outstanding first effort and NetScreen clearly has strong
insight into the way network executives want to handle policy-
based security management.

For the full report, go to
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2002/0107rev2.html

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To contact Neal Weinberg:

Neal Weinberg is features editor at Network World, in charge
of product reviews, Buyer's Guides, technology primers,
how-tos, issue-oriented feature stories and the Technology
Insider series. You can reach him at mailto:nweinber@nww.com.
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RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Review: NetScreen-500 firewall/VPN appliance
Network World, 07/16/01
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2001/0716rev.html

NetScreen automates VPN policy mgmt.
Network World, 11/12/01
http://www.nwfusion.com/archive/2001/127359_11-12-2001.html

The archive for Reviews is:
http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/index.html
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

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Copyright Network World, Inc., 2002

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