Cedarville U Sets Up SonicWall Firewalls

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/10/08

Cedarville University in southwestern Ohio has implemented SonicWall firewalls to provide high-speed gateway firewall protection for its 3,000 students.

"We support one active port per pillow, with about 2,500 PCs in dorm rooms alone," said Nathan Hay, network engineer. "Most of the traffic is Web browsing or off-campus access to our network, like people checking e-mail from home."

Hay used the services of SonicWall reseller Cerdant, which recommended a managed solution implementing a pair of SonicWall E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E7500 devices, configured in high-availability mode for automatic failover.

"The big thing I've noticed with the E7500 is all the unwanted peer-to- peer traffic that is getting dropped," said Hay. "We're only running at 30 percent or lower utilization even in full swing. That should make a big difference when we go from a 90 Mbps to a 150 Mbps Internet pipe in the fall."

"The packet capturing is particularly helpful," said Hay. "Our library system is managed by a third party, and when issues arise, it helps us troubleshoot problems and avoid finger pointing."

"We really liked the [virtual private network] (VPN) connectivity from the E7500," said Hay. "Our Computer Services department especially uses that pretty heavily." The E7500 features IPSec VPN functionality for secure point-to-point remote access.