Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

RE: Multiple firewalls from different manufactureres


From: "Eugene Kuznetsov" <eugene () datapower com>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:35:18 -0500

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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