Re: Question about firewall

[David Porcello <DPorcello () vermontmutual com>]

Leslie - I've had nightmare experiences with Check Point's UTM line. These appliances suffer from the usual "all in 
one" syndrome, combined with Check Point's huge QA process cuts and off-shoring of all R&D to Israel over the past few 
years. Many of the soft blades are based on B-grade technologies from a variety of third-party developers, so you end 
up with a hodge podge of sub-par components that don't play well together.

Some of the highlights:

:: Occasional kernel panics, reboots, loss of traffic, and 15-minute CPU saturation during policy installs. After 12 
months of troubleshooting and replacement of *all* UTM hardware, Check Point recommended to move the Smartcenter to HP 
hardware. It's been fine since.

:: IPS blade dropping traffic when in monitor-only mode. Escalated to R&D in Israel, closed ticket with no resolution 
after 3+ months.

:: AV scanner dropping all HTTP traffic when certain features enabled. No resolution.

:: Check Point unable to get the Eventia reporting or QoS blades working in any capacity (!) after 6+ months of 
troubleshooting.

Overall, it's been a blast! =)

We ended up scrapping everything except the basic firewall blade, and I'm currently evaluating (and am very impressed 
with) Palo Alto firewalls as an alternative.
Dave.



From: pauldotcom-bounces () pdc-mail pauldotcom com [mailto:pauldotcom-bounces () pdc-mail pauldotcom com] On Behalf Of 
leslie l
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2011 8:31 PM
To: pauldotcom () pdc-mail pauldotcom com
Subject: [Pauldotcom] Question about firewall



What does everyone think about a Check Point UTM-1 2050 firewall?

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