Above: 2 X Allied Telesis AR4050S units side by side housed in the very well made AT-RKMT-J15 1U rack shelf option
The Powerful Security Solution That Saves 'U' Space!
ACC Yotta have always been a staunch supporter of Allied Telesis products, as mentioned on our brand page for them, they have actually pioneered many features now commonly found on 'enterprise' switches such as EPSR (Ethernet Protection Switched Ring) and VC Stack (Virtual Chassis Stacking) - the latter in particular we have used way back since its evolution from Stack XG. In our book it's still the best implementation of virtualising multiple switches together to form a logical single entity.
Recently however, Allied have been raising eyebrows with the launch of their two Next Generation Firewall Products, the AR3050S and AR4050S. These products grant Allied access to the exclusive club of mainstream manufactures who offer advanced models of both Switching and Firewall products, such as Cisco and Juniper - however unlike these two vendors, Allieds products come in at a far lower price point and as so are therefore more relevant to businesses that are seeking viable integrated security solutions. With the additional advantage of another Allied Telesis innovation, Allied Management Framework (AMF) it's now possible to not only to have a fully integrated security policy across your organisation, but also integrated network and firewall management too, and across multiple sites. Imagine being able to manage, backup, restore and configure all your organisations switches and firewalls from a single central controller, across multiple sites? With Allied AMF, this is exactly what you can do.
The end result of this integration of both firewall and switch makes for a far more efficient system to manage and so it can therefore be argued that this results in better security by design, simply because more time can be spent focusing on day to day security events, rather than say, rebuilding a switch configuration - something that can be done in seconds with AMF. Keeping a consistent an uniform vendor for both switching and firewalling also eliminates compatibility problems, and also human error to a certain extent as technical staff only have to learn to master one platform, not many.
Finally, as demonstrated with some photos we have taken from a recent delivery of AR4050s units along with their 1U rack tray (Allied Model Number AT-RKMT-J15) you can see that Allied AR4050S when deployed with the AT-RKMT-J15, also saves you space too, enabling you to run two units side by side, something we always wanted to do with the ever so slightly wider PaloAlto Networks PA200.
Above: An Allied AR4050S inside the Rack Mount Shelf Option AT-RKMT-J15. In the background to the left you can compare the size of the AR4050S with the PaloAlto PA200
You are going to hear quite a bit more about the AR4050S from us in the next few weeks – it has a very useful ability to perform WAN Bypass fail-over (meaning you can connect one DSL modem to FW1 and still access it from FW2 even if FW1 were to fail) which vastly simplifies H/A set-ups, especially when you have a primary WAN and backup, perhaps mobile data backup at that….
Above: The Rack Mount Shelf Option AT-RKMT-J15 for mounting of two AR4050S units in one 1U side by side
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