Discussion on:

Next-generation firewalls: Security without compromising performance

in my NGFW research. This gateway better have some impressive processing power. This will make my search for my next UTM appliance rather difficult.

This doesn't even take into account the big increase our ISP is providing in speed, and the fact that N wireless is a new requirement.

Shopping for hardware specs is important and remember different types of architecture will offer different benefits. Also, deep packet inspection (DPI) offers significantly better protection than stateful packet inspection; when reviewing performance metrics be sure to consider DPI performance. Here is helpful site:
http://www.sonicwall.com/us/en/products/Deep_Packet_Inspection.html

Processors and memory are obviously important. A good way to know how the product will truly perform in your environment is to take into consideration third-party, independent testing metrics as these will be closer to what type of performance you will actually see. Independent tests should outline the exact conditions that were evaluated and provide a methodology that fully discloses all test conditions.

The SonicWall lineup has an extremely easy to use, small learning curve GUI. We have a NSA 3500. It plays nicer with other brands of firewalls than say Cisco (we have a mixed environment of Juniper and SonicWall) which can't be understated. I don't give out five stars ever, but the NSA series gets an easy 4.5. ViewPoint is nice as well.

In other words, corporate sponsored man-in-the-middle attacks on its own staff. Serious privacy issues in that. While I can understand that it is important to be able to filter malicious scripts etc., everyone I talk to about this type of device is not comfortable having a machine on the network pulling apart your secure traffic. It gives the impression that it will provide someone with access to that device a way to get to the data that they should not be privy to like my passwords, credit card information, other personal details that we spend so much time and effort trying to secure.
There has to be a better balance than this.