steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

Is it possible that the sheer lack of reviews out there means that no one is using these devices or does it simply mean that no one that has implemented one has had the time to review it? I am looking into installing a virus, spam and spyware scanning gateway for a number of clients on our network. I have looked into products by SonicWall, TrendMicro, Symantec and McAfee, but am having trouble finding reviews on any of the products. It is great to see the claim that they can do all of these things and more (firewalling, nat, vpn, etc), but I want to know how effective their products are. In the process of researching the different devices offered by all of these companies, I have come across SafeSquid. It is a proxy based upon Squid that also has the advertised ability to scan for viruses. Through a bit of research, though, I was unable to find whether it would also help with detecting spyware. In my opinion and based upon experience, I'm seeing spyware as just as great or greater of a problem than viruses. (Perhaps because anti-virus software seems to be fairly mature whereas anti-spyware software really has a lot of difficult obstacles to overcome before it reaches the quality or reliability of anti-virus software.) If I am filtering viruses at the point of origin for the network, it would be no better than what I currently have (nothing other than the firewall) if everyone were to become overrun with spyware. My buddy Jeff and I spent four hours at a customer's home back in October "fixing" a computer completely bombed with spyware. If we could reduce the number of calls people make regarding problems with their computers (which will inevitably happen with the expansion of our residential service), we would alleviate a large future headache that I am very concerned about.
Given my intention to find a device that will help me protect 40-75 customers at < 6 mbps (all future, not current), I think it would be intelligent to see what other people are using and learn from their experience instead of being the one to conquer the world. I have neither the time nor energy to be a leader in this area, as there are plenty of other issues I want to deal with at this point (like getting towers up and running and increasing bandwidth availability to my customers).
So, if anyone out there has had experience with any of the above listed companies/devices, please drop me a line. I would love to hear from you (yeah - the two of you who look at this website once a year). In the mean time, I am working on finding vendors who would be willing to let me try their products to see if they even work the way they claim they should. Wouldn't that be ducky?