[FW1] RE: Nokia/Check Point/SolutionPaq

["Mark Decker" <mdecker@FW1-NOSPAMrainfinity.com>]

Hi Jason,

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Costomiris
>Let's see, each vendor realized that they were much better at selling
>their own products than the other guy's stuff, so they fixed it.  Yeah,
>that sounds terrible.  Wake up.  You forgot to mention that Nokia and
>CP signed a 2-year agreement when the last agreement expired.  As a
>rule, CP never signs anything longer than one year.

I don't understand the defensive tone of your reply.  It would appear
you somehow misinterpreted my comments as a slam against Nokia, which
they are certainly not intended to be.  Nokia makes fine products, and
is still a partner of CP.  I was merely trying to dispel rumors of a
"war" between the companies and make a statement of the facts of the
current relationship.  As I understand it, although Nokia and CP may
have signed another agreement, the terms are different and the new
agreement does not provide an exclusive distribution arrangement for
FW-1/VPN-1 appliances similar to what they had in the past.  I won't
speculate on the reasons for this change in the relationship, since I
wasn't at the contract negotiations. ;-)  Regardless of their reasons
for doing so, CP has now opened up the CP-based appliance market and
leveled the playing field for other vendors through its OPSEC appliance
program.  In my mind, that's a positive thing.  While Nokia is good,
having a choice is better.

>A lot of competition?  From Compaq?  A Compaq pre-sales engineer shared
>with me that a packed-out DL320 (what they sell as the SolutionPaq)
>does about 90 Mbps in FW1 performance tests.  It only costs about 15%
less
>than an IP330, but with the IP330 testing at 130 Mbps is nearly 50%
>faster than the DL320.  Oh by the way, the DL320 has a 1Ghz P-III to
>match up against then AMD K6-2/400...

Our internal testing results show the Compaq box does better than you
describe vs. the IP330.  We found that a base DL320 SolutionPaq has much
faster throughput than the base IP330 in identical environments.  (BTW,
you can put up to 2G of RAM in the SolutionPaq, and up to 6 NICs, while
the IP330 is a fixed config with 256MB RAM and 3 NICs.)  With FLOWS
enabled on the Nokia, the Nokia throughput goes up significantly, but I
understand there are still a few drawbacks to using FLOWS (admittedly,
not my area of expertise, so forgive me if I've overstated the FLOWS
issue; perhaps someone else can elaborate).  Personally, I'd like to see
an independent magazine do an apples-to-apples benchmark test of
similarly configured DL320 vs IP330, and then see how they fare.  In any
case, the vast majority of IP330s serve T3 circuits or smaller, so it
hardly matters as long as they can both do >45Mbps.  People with an OC-3
are likely buying a bigger box anyway.

As far as price goes, the base IP330 lists at $4,950, while the base
DL320 SolutionPaq lists at $3,249.  I'm no math whiz, but I believe
that's more than 1/3 less expensive, rather than only 15%.  If buying
100 units for all your branch offices, that's a recession-friendly
savings of over $170,000. :-)

Best regards,

Mark L. Decker
Rainfinity - High Availability for E-Businessmdecker@rainfinity.com




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