Introduction

Introduction

NETGEAR recently announced its newest router, the SRX5308 ProSafe Gigabit Quad WAN SSL VPN Firewall.  I'm pleased to be the first to review this device, which the company proclaims as the flagship of its ProSafe firewall family!

The 5308 is equipped with four Gigabit WAN ports plus four Gigabit LAN ports, and is designed to be at the core of a network with  100+ users.  NETGEAR's specifications list capacity to handle 200,000 concurrent connections, support for up to 254 VLANs, 125 simultaneous IPSec VPN tunnels, and 50 simultaneous SSL VPN tunnels.  Holy smokes!

Although brand new, the SRX5308 has similar menus and options to several NETGEAR routers and gateways I've reviewed, including the FVS336G, the FVS318G, and the UTM10.  Throughout this review, I'll be referencing sections from those reviews as appropriate. 

The SRX is a 1U height device, measuring 13” x 1.7” x 8.2”.  It is enclosed in a metal case with NETGEAR's ProSafe grey and blue metal exterior and intended for a data room, not a desktop.  The exhaust fan on the left side is quite loud, so it is not a device you want in your office or work area.  The chassis supports side brackets for rack mounting in a data center.

The front of the device has both the LAN and WAN ports, with simple status indicator lights as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: SRX5308 Front Panel

The rear of the device (Figure 2) has a serial console port, security port to physically lock the device to a physical structure, AC power connector and power switch.

Figure 2: SRX5308 Rear Panel

Inside

The motherboard is neatly laid out with plenty of room for airflow through the chassis.  The SRX runs on a 700Mhz Cavium CN5010 CPU, 512 MB of DDR2 of RAM, 64 MB of Flash and a Broadcom BCM53118 9-Port GbE Switch with 8 Integrated 10/100/1000 PHYs chip.  The latter is also used in NETGEAR's FVS318G. The CPU and Ethernet chips have passive heatsinks, removed for the picture.  I've called out some of the components in Figure 3.

Figure 3: SRX5308 board