Reaching out to anyone that may have an insight on this topic.  I have been asked to look for an AntiVirus Gateway.  There are so many options out there, but I am wondering if anyone has had better luck with one brand over another.  I would like to know which is better, or not so good, before making a purchase and find out later that I should have gone with Brand B instead of Brand A.

I have seen that most are bundled together as a UTM.  But we are looking for just a hardware based solution that scans all traffic (all ports) for virus/malware patterns and then block it (inline).  No other stuff needed to slow it down.  But - also give a report in realtime as to whom/where/what occured.  Obviously, definition updates are a must.

Any insight/thoughts and such would be appreciated.
Thank you!

If your budget is unlimited, I'd consider TopChoice firewalls.  They are not specifically antivirus, but I think they integrate with someone or the other.  They are stupid fast and understand protocol grammar.  So much so that they were dropping MS08-067 (remember Conficker) packets before MS announced they had a problem.

Another option (but also very pricey) is McAfee sidewinder.  I knew a guy that worked for McAfee and they make a darn good product.  I have been rather unimpressed with their AV solutions in general, but a sidewinder demo has me convinced that they got the gateway solution right.

Oh, if you are willing to go with HTTP protection, I'd look at FireEye (http://www.fireeye.com/).  I don't personally implement this in my network, but would if I were given the choice.  They have awesome detection engines, a great database of "known bads" and virtualized (read VMWare) execution of unknown code so they know if a dropper is active.

I know two customers who said when they get a ticket from the appliance saying that a user just got malware on the machine, they don't need to check, they just reimage.  They just know its that good.

I don't think they do anything other than web protection, but if you are willing to implement more than one vendor for the total solution, I'd seriously consider them.