ZyXEL ZyWALL USG 300

The offering from ZyXEL is an appliance-based offering that runs on a 1U rack mounted device. The ZyWALL USG 300 provides seven Ethernet gigabit interfaces that can be separately addressed and configured. The USG 300 is a stateful inspection firewall. It allows for deep packet inspection beyond the traditional packet filtering capability.

The product is feature-rich, with built-in anti-virus and intrusion detection/intrusion prevention features. Some additional included features of the USG 300 include web caching, user authentication, content filtering and event alerting. The product offers many different types of failover, and even includes expansion ports for the ability to add a card for cellular backup of the primary WAN interface. The ZyWall also has several VPN options to configure, which include a IPsec VPN, a SSL VPN, as well as a L2TP VPN.

The installation of the USG 300 was quite simple and the entire setup is run through a web browser session. The quick start wizard allows for assignment of IP addresses for the interfaces, but little more.

Once the initial wizard is complete the configuration is a little confusing. The firewall rules are set up and configured through the same web browser interface, but it takes a few tries to get the hang of the configuration of the firewall rules. Logging of event information is also available through the same web browser interface. The web interface does have some nice features, including a device overview, which shows current hardware usage statistics, such as memory, flash and CPU utilization.

Documentation is not included with the USG 300 other than a FAQs document, which answers some common questions about the configuration of the device. We would like to have seen a getting started guide, which would have made the initial configuration easier.

Support is available via phone and web. The web support is free, and support is a large and easy-to-use knowledge base. Contact information for support is listed on the website.