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.

Reviews
By
published

IT Pro Verdict

Check Point’s SmartConsole management and monitoring tools are geared up towards handling multiple appliances and this makes the 2210 best suited to remote office deployment or offered as a managed security solution. SMBs will find the appliance offers a very impressive range of features that perform well for the price, but as a standalone product it’s not the easiest to deploy and manage.

Image 1 of 6
Check Point 2210 Appliance
Check Point 2210 Appliance

Check Point 2210 Appliance

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.

The appliance’s web interface provides a quick start wizard to get the network ports configured.

The appliance’s web interface provides a quick start wizard to get the network ports configured.

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.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.