Intro
In the modern world, routers have firewall capabilities and firewalls have router capabilities. The feature sets are so blurry that any attempt to try to wholly separate them is purely academic. That said, routers and firewalls are "technical opposites". By default, a router wants to route any traffic over any connected interface - unless it's told not to. A firewall, however, exists to prevent traffic from moving between two points. Effectively, its job is to block traffic unless told not to.
As we state throughout this site, TNSR® software is first and foremost a software router. But, it's a highly-scalable software router with rich access control list (firewall rule) capabilities.
TNSR software, today, is not a Unified Threat Management (UTM) or Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) device. However, that is on purpose. Many of our customers request a multi-gigabit router with suitable firewall controls. In fact, they eschew the use of UTM/NGFW products - owing to flagging performance when security functions like anti-virus/spyware/phishing/spam, IDS/IPS, and application fire-walling via deep packet inspection are activated - let alone whether those security functions are even effective. For others - who rely on endpoint solutions for Anti-X, email scanning at the email server, and a separate IDS/IPS appliance for intensive malware detection and blocking - most of what is promised in a UTM/NGFW is both marginal and expensive.
