Firewall Wizards: RE: Multiple firewalls from different manufactureres

["Eugene Kuznetsov" <eugene () datapower com>]

> Of Keith A. Glass
> Yes and no.  You CAN put up a decent firewalling solution 
> using commodity computers, especially the 1-U units (Dell 
> 1700-series, HP Proliant DL360s, etc. . ) and either Linux, 
> Solaris (now that it's free) or some flavor of BSD, and the 
> firewall of your choice.  I just wish some of the vendors 
> would allow their FW solution to be available outside the 
> "appliance" vehicle (Yes, I'm talking about Symantec and 
> Secure Computing. . .)
Hmm, this is pretty interesting, because it's contrary to what I hear
elsewhere. Could you talk about why you would rather get software instead of
a sealed appliance -- ignoring, for the time being, the cases where the
appliance includes hardware acceleration for some aspects of security
processing. Is it perceived cost? Desire to reuse old hardware? Even for
Checkpoint, over 50% of the business is appliance-based, maybe more now.

Now, granted, if what you're getting from the vendor is the dreaded "server
appliance" -- the same Dell 1U server with RedHat & some custom software
preinstalled -- it probably doesn't matter. 

\\ Eugene Kuznetsov, Chairman & CTO  : eugene () datapower com 
\\ DataPower Technology, Inc.        : Web Services security 
\\ http://www.datapower.com          : XML-aware networks   


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