Wednesday, December 12, 2007

SMB Firewall 2.0 - Open Source vs Commercial

Many companies are updating their old firewalls or investigating newer "next gen" options with more features. I've recently helped customers evaluate these options and came up with some surprising results.

Cisco ASA5505 10user IPSEC ~$375

Netscreen 5gt 10user IPSEC ~$450

Sonicwall TZ170 10user IPSEC ~$400

3com/Tippingpoint X5 ~$600

While the quality of hardware is nice, I found the commercial offerings available for the small/medium sized business space is very limited in functionality and open source solution to be much more feature rich (and free!)

Lets review some of the options:

Pfsense - Very feature rich, easy to use and slick web based management (based on m0n0wall)

M0n0wall - Stable freebsd based firewall with all the basics + more such as QoS and Wifi AP support.

Shorewall - Linux based firewall packages with QoS and many other features

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