RE: [fw-wiz] PIX vs Checkpoint vs Sonicwall vs Netscreen - comme nts?

From: Gregory Austin (greg@austinconsulting.com)
Date: 07/30/02 

To: firewall-wizards@honor.icsalabs.com
From: Gregory Austin <greg@austinconsulting.com>
Date: Tue Jul 30 06:48:02 2002

Hello all,

      Felt I too had to throw my $0.02 on this little Checkpoint versus
Netscreen discussion. I work for a security services company, and we sell
a whole bunch of Checkpoint. I touch a whole bunch of Checkpoint, quite a
bit of PIX, and a little bit of Netscreen, Watchguard, etc.--but that's
changing. In my experience the Netscreen product is not only vastly
superior to Checkpoint in terms of price and performance, but the company
actually seems to be working to improve their product (unlike Checkpoint
and their latest piece of betaware, No-Go).

      On performance consider this: I have a customer who put in 100mbps
service between their major metro sites on one of those big fiber
carriers. They want the traffic between the sites tunneled. For close to
the same money it would cost them to get tiny little Nokia IP-120's that
can only push <3mbps VPN traffic, they can get Netscreen 204's that can
push >100mbps of VPN traffic.

      Good central management is nice, agreed, but is it worth getting bent
over on the price? Any way you look at it, rape is the best term to
describe their licensing. I will admit that you can't beat Checkpoint when
it comes to interoperability, though. Through all of their OPSEC alliances
they've built up a huge stable of products that will play (mostly) nicely
with FW-1.

     Also, consider another reason to not go Checkpoint. The last time I
remember a company with this big a market share being this arrogant and
making this many bad moves was Novell in '93. They'll be able to coast for
5 or 6 years on declining market share alone, but I can't imagine a rosy
future for them unless something changes. When you can buy technically
superior better performing products for vastly less money it's only a
matter of time before the market gets a clue.

      Just my opinion, certainly not that of my employer (party line: We
love Checkpoint!),

Greg

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