Sonicwall Roadshow

Jeremie and I had the opportunity to travel to Ohio for a Sonicwall Roadshow.  This event was designed to educate those using the Sonicwall product line specifically about the new E-Class UTM hardware.  Since we are looking at the E-Class 5500 as a possible option for our load balancing needs it was a no brain-er to travel to the Roadshow. 

Some highlights from the trip:

I had reserved a rental car from the Enterprise website and found out the next morning that the transaction didn’t complete, and there was no reservation.  The best part of this experience was the individual at the desk at Enterprise tells me “Even if you had a reservation we don’t have any cars, so it really doesn’t matter.”  So Budget Rental car here we come…

A rental car with a bunch of tech stuff powered on… GPS, Cell Phones teathered to laptops for web browsing, IPod etc.

- Dinner at Red Robin Restaurant (home of the bottomless fries!!) with my parents.

- Fixing all my parent’s computer issues… Actually the list was short…configuring both Tivos to connect to the Wifi since we had changed the encryption to WPA and configuring Dad’s new laptop to connect to the Wifi .

Roadshow was good, a little more ’sales pitch’ than I had hoped but informative but we still learned some things:

- Single Sign-On with Content Filtering only works with Windows machines, if you are rolling this out to all users and you have some Macs on the network that aren’t running a virtual Windows machine this will require a default policy for unauthenticated users.

• - There is some major development going into the CDP.  They are bringing to market a CDP that has removable drives and is much more expandable than the existing product line.
• - We were able to give our list of our top 5 causes of heartburn with the CDP to David K. (the CDP Territory Sales Manager) who is going follow up with us to find some ’work arounds’ and then help get our concerns on the development road map.

- David K. mentioned we can work toward some possible options for non-profits for off site CDP replication that aren’t as crazy expensive as the current Sonicwall services

- After meeting with some of the E-Class engineers we have a strategy to quickly install and test the E-Class to determine if it is a ’real’ LB option for us.

- Lunch Jeremie and my Mom at the busiest Wendy’s in the state of Ohio.  This Wendy’s location is in the lower level of The Ohio State University Medical Center.

- Dinner with David, Ruth and Nathan Szpunar at Donatos (one of the best Pizza places)

13 hours of driving, 5 hours of Roadshow a worthwhile trip.