The Network Security Appliance (NSA) series from SonicWall placed third in our network firewall category. Like the other winners in that category, this product is a line of multifunction appliances that do much more than simple firewalling. A differentiator, according to SonicWall, is its patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) technology, which allows the NSA series to perform adequate intrusion prevention without sacrificing speed and bandwidth.

Eighty percent of Product Leadership survey respondents considered the NSA's ability to block intrusions, attacks and unauthorized network traffic to be good or excellent, and 78% found the ease of management and maintenance of the product to be good or excellent.

One user had "nothing but good to say about the SonicWall." And while another user said that the NSA was "trouble-free so far," yet another said that NSA is an "interesting product, [but it] does nothing to tell us why we are having problems with access to our network." Overall ratings showed, however, that no one thought the logging, monitoring and reporting was poor, which was not the case with Juniper Networks' and Cisco's winning firewall products.