[ale] VPN choices...

[M Raju]

>From my experience, the reason big companies prefer Cisco, Netscreen,
Checkpoint, etc also heavily depends on politics (sale reps providing
access to that nice golf trip to your pointy-haired managers) which
acts as a deciding factor over technical merit of a particular
solution.

Although I find that companies who have a .com type culture are more
open to OSS solutions before ruling them out. I recently had a couple
of short assignments where I threw out a few PIX 515Es and also a
Nokia IPSO for an OpenBSD PF/CARP/PFSync Firewall/VPN cluster also
providing IPSec via ISAkmpd. Snort/SGUIL was also added to provide a
NSM (Network Security Monitoring) framework....

This of course depends on whether your Security team/person requires
spoon-feeding and cannot  use "man xyz or Google", in which case the
commercial solution would be more appropriate...

_Raju




On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 18:18:41 -0500, Jonathan Rickman <jrickman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:48:26 -0500, Christopher Fowler
> <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> > My question should draw a flame war.  When does an OSS solution like
> > Linux with IP Filtering trump hardware like the Cisco PIX?  ISS?
> 
> Depends on the context of the deployment and the type of hardware the
> Linux solution is based on. Remember, quite a few commercial systems
> use Linux or BSD as a base. It's more a question of the capability of
> the hardware than software in many circumstances. Once you get to a
> certain point in the feature comparison matrix it comes down to who
> has the most reliable/fast/smallest/etc hardware. It is there that
> Linux on Intel starts to fall behind.
> 
> An extreme example:
> http://cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps2706/ps4452/index.html
> 
> A less extreme example:
> http://sofaware.com/general.aspx?boneId=135&DTId=142&objId=94
> 
> Note the Checkpoint/Sofaware 225U. That little box with all those
> features and performance that I have personally verified is about
> $1700 dollars. You're gonna have a hard time putting together a more
> full featured and faster system for that money unless you resort to
> eBay. At that point, we're talking junk...not business class hardware.
> 
> My experience is that most small to mid sized companies with no more
> than 5 sites are usually well served with a well documented OSS
> solution on commodity hardware, except in some special cases. Itty
> bitty companies are better served by off the shelf appliances like the
> Cisco PIX 501. Big companies want Cisco, Checkpoint, Sunscreen, etc.
> There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.
> 
> --
> Jonathan
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> 


-- 
May the packets be with you.