all-in-one vs one-on-each (feat. Comercial vs FOSS)

Hello list,

I would like some opinions, again.
For a fixed budget would you go for
 * an all-in-one "Firewall" ( FW+IPS+VPN+...) ie. Checkpoint,
 * a dedicated, known and expensive firewall/gateway with the company of
an Open Source solution for IPS, URL filtering etc?
 * a full Open Source solution (iptables,snort,ossec,squid etc) and
spend the money elsewhere :)

The things that concern me are,

Redundancy. I can live without IPS for a while but not without Internet
( and by "I" I mean "The Company")
Scalability. Not only performance-wise but cost-wise too. I think that
having to pay for every "extra feature" is going to lead to Open Source
anyway...
Complexity. Better to manage one than more, right?...

Any opinion appreciated!

Cheers, Alex.
Received on May 24 2008