On 2006.04.30, at 11:34 PM, S t i n g r a y wrote:
enterprise firewall what is the diffrence between pf & MS ISA / cisco pix or checkpoint ? performance ? stability or features ?
Marketing which is designed to put a fright into people who have responsibility for systems and data which are not theirs. That marketing then takes the frightened IT manager and gives them the warm fuzzies by talking about enterprise level support, SLA's, industry standards, well chosen (and seemingly bogus) TCO case studies and sometimes horror stories of people who did not choose to use them.
It is all bullshit though. Because all that is designed to get your money and the enterprise systems cost in a big way... then they start talking about on-going support.
I've worked in some places which had 5 figure (AU) support contracts for firewall, IDS, etc and the systems were flakey (reboot every few days to weeks!), the phone support was shit and the people that came out were clueless.
The difference is marketing targeted to the people that matter to the vendor. The easily frightened managers and not the nerdy types who would rather put together a couple of decent quality machines with OpenBSD, pf and CARP, etc.
Shane
