RE: PIX vs Checkpoint vs Sonicwall vs Netscreen - comme nts?

[Gregory Austin <greg () austinconsulting com>]

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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