NetGear has announced the ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall, which it says is the first business firewall to provide in excess of 1Gigabit per second (Gbps) performance for under US$500..

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) firewall for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and distributed enterprise, the SRX5308 delivers up to 1 Gbps of firewall throughput. It sports four Gigabit WAN ports that provide session-based load balancing and features a hardware-accelerated data flow architecture that enables 1 Gbps LAN-to-WAN of stateful firewall throughput. What’s more, the SRX5308 affords remote users the ability to build VPN tunnels to the corporate office to access centralized data using the IP Security (IPsec) standard or software clientless Secure Socket Layers (SSL).

The SRX5308 firewall supports up to 125 IPsec VPN tunnels and 50 SSL VPN tunnels simultaneously, for enhanced protection from network security threats. The NetGear ProSafe Quad WAN Gigabit SSL VPN Firewall is compatible with Mac OS X, Windows, Unix and Linux systems nd comes with full 24/7 technical support.

The SRX5308 is available now from direct marketers, e-commerce sites, and value-added resellers at an estimated U.S. street price starting at $499. Details can be found at http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/SSLVPNConcentrators/SRX5308.aspx .