SonicWALL Delivers High-Performance Network Security for Birmingham-Southern College

Birmingham-Southern Deploys SonicWALL NSA E7500 to Establish Enterprise-class Unified Threat Management for Campus Network

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ – SonicWALL, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNWL), a leading secure network infrastructure company, today announced that Birmingham-Southern College, a four-year, private liberal arts institution affiliated with the United Methodist Church based in Birmingham, Alabama, has deployed SonicWALL(R) E-Class Network Security Appliance (NSA) E7500 firewalls to provide high-performance gateway firewall protection for its campus network.

The campus network is comprised of approximately 1,000 college-owned Windows-based systems and 200 network laser printers, serving faculty, administration and multiple academic labs. “It has to be easy and it has to work all the time or I just couldn’t do my job,” said Jesse McKneely, Director of Infrastructure and Project Management.

McKneely had decided to upgrade to the NSA E7500 after his previous SonicWALL PRO 5060 firewall began running at 40% of its intended capacity.

The NSA E7500 protects against a wide range of network attacks using a re-assembly free deep packet inspection engine in combination with parallel performance 16-core architecture, for unprecedented ultra-high-speed threat protection, reliability and scalability. “I don’t think I’ve activated half the available processors. That’s fantastic, because we will inevitably be hit with the next big hack or virus, but I don’t have any doubts that we have the security and throughput to handle it,” said McKneely.

The NSA E7500 also provides McKneely with a set of customizable Application Firewall tools for precise control and inspection of enterprise network traffic. “The E7500 gives me the tools I need to set up very specific rules for, say, blocking access to troublesome URLs. I would have trouble doing that with other firewalls.”

McKneely has succeeded in using his SonicWALL solution to deploy high-performance enterprise-class network security while keeping within the limits of his academic budget. “I’ve looked into other solutions with similar functionality such as Cisco, and they are all far more expensive. SonicWALL gives me the performance I need with more money left in my budget.”

The NSA E7500 fiber-optic ports allowed McKneely to easily and affordably relocate the firewall to support his server redundancy initiative. “We could have never done that without having the fiber-optic option. It saved us at least $10,000, not to mention a whole lot of my time. The beauty of it was that I was able to take the money I saved and apply it to a new core switch for my servers.”

Many of today’s threats to campus network security originate from inside the network. “The Layer 2 Bridge functionality in the NSA E7500 gave us the ability to protect us from ourselves,” said McKneely. He now passes third-party-managed student residence network traffic through the NSA E7500, providing confidence that threats or malware are not being brought into the network while providing residential students the same performance and functionality available on the campus network.

“In the four-plus years I’ve been using SonicWALL, I’ve never had a single technical problem with any device or needed to call support,” said McKneely. “I couldn’t survive without SonicWALL.”

About SonicWALL, Inc.

SonicWALL is committed to improving the performance and productivity of businesses of all sizes by engineering the cost and complexity out of running a secure network. Over one million SonicWALL appliances have been shipped through its global network of ten thousand channel partners to keep tens of millions of worldwide business computer users safe and in control of their data. SonicWALL’s award-winning solutions include network security, secure remote access, content security, backup and recovery, and policy and management technology. For more information, visit the company web site at http://www.sonicwall.com/.

Safe Harbor Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this press release are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the benefits associated with the NSA E7500 device. These forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the time the statements are made and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. In addition, please see the “Risk Factors” described in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, for a more detailed description of the risks facing our business. All forward-looking statements included in this release are based upon information available to SonicWALL as of the date of the release, and we assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statement.

NOTE: SonicWALL is a registered trademark of SonicWALL, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

SOURCE SonicWALL, Inc.