Re: Firewall Products

[Justin Dover <dover () HARPETHHALL ORG>]

My PIX just died on me this week.  We had a PIX 515.  I am replacing it with a Cisco ASA 5510.  It
is basically a PIX, Antivirus, VPN Concentrator, and IDS/IPS box all in one.  I have seen these in
action before and they are great.  For the base unit it isnt much more expensive than a PIX 515.
If you buy the antivirus/IDS/IPS module than the price goes up to around $5000.  Over double the
price of it without the module.  You do not have to have this module but it has a much better
IDS/IPS system than the PIX 7.0 software and you have one extra layer of antivirus protection.
Below is a link to the ASA boxes.  At the bottom of that page there is a model comparison.

http://cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6120/index.html

For email spam and antivirus we use a product called Swirbo.  It is offsite solution.  Very cheap
and works great.  This is probably one of my top 3 must have products.  You can put the control
into the users hands so they get can manage their spam/antivirus settings or you can make it
invisible to the user and only have you admins look at it.  I maybe spend 30 minutes a month
looking at it.  It also stores all of your email if your site is down, just like mine was for half
of a day this week.  When your site comes back up it will start slowing sending your all of the
emails.  I think it will do that for up too a week or two of down time.  It also removes all of the
spam in their data center and then sends you the good stuff.  You dont have to waste your bandwidth
by receiving the bad emails then having some onsite solution like Barracuda filter it.  I am not
knocking Barracuda though.  I used a Barracuda box and loved it for a year but Swirbo is better
because of the off-site benefits.  www.swirbo.com.

Justin Dover
Harpeth Hall School
615-346-0082