SonicWall this week announced two new security appliances targeted at the small/medium business market that include enhanced firewall and administrative features.

The SonicWall Pro 230 and Pro 330 Internet security appliances offer firewall and VPN functionality and are upgrades to the company's existing Pro 100 appliance, says Douglas Brockett, vice president of worldwide marketing for the company.

Among the new firewall features included in the Pro 230 and Pro 330 is support for multiple protected zones for increased security, enabling users to create a DMZ or attach a second, secure LAN to the same appliance. The appliances can also work in conjunction with an existing firewall, functioning solely as a VPN device -- or what SonicWall calls Single-Arm Mode VPN. Both products also include ASIC-based VPN acceleration.

The Pro 230 supports 190M bps of firewall throughput and 30,000 firewall connections. It offers 25M bps of VPN throughput with 168-bit 3DES encryption, supports about 500 VPN tunnels and comes bundled with support for 10 VPN clients. The Pro 330 also supports 190M bps of firewall throughput, but allows 128,000 concurrent connections. It handles 45M bps of VPN throughput, also with 168-bit 3DES encryption, and about 1,000 VPN tunnels. It comes bundled with 200 VPN clients.

SonicWall also announced a new firmware version for its appliances, Firmware 6.4. It adds support for Dead Peer Detection (DPD), which is the ability to detect and automatically re-establish a failed VPN connection. Also new is support for Fully Qualified Domain Name, which eases administration by enabling users to employ standard domain names instead of formal IP addresses, and support for the Point to Point Tunneling Protocol.

The Pro230 costs $1,995 and the Pro330 costs $2,795. Both are available now.