# cisco vs pfsense



## saeedpersa (Jan 10, 2018)

hello every one

i want to know why we are better than cisco?

tell me:
I bought HP DL 60 G9 with Xeon 2603 v4 ,16GB Ram 1 SSD HDD 6 GIG LAN PORT
and installed PF sense the last one. and also I can Upgrade it when ever I want. I can add RAM I can add second CPU and also upgrade my CPU I can add 10GB lan port or fiber port on it
I have every thing I want like Network Firewall ,WAF , DNS , AND ETC
it was about 1000$

with this scale if i wanted to buy cisco to protect my data how much should i pay? tons on dollars and i had yearly licence which it costs me lot.

why some people says that cisco is much better than your solutions ?
PLEASE SHARE YOUR IDEAS


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## scottro (Jan 10, 2018)

This seems as if you want to post to the pfsense forums.  While based on FreeBSD, it is quite different.

https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php


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## Phishfry (Jan 10, 2018)

One word. Efficiency. 
While your server can preform the same task think of the power consumption difference between a specially designed packet switching ASIC and your general purpose CPU.

The APU2 is a good example. It can do line speed gigabit ethernet no problem. But throw a couple of normal services on top like NAT and OpenSSL and all of a sudden your down to one third the throughput. Granted the APU is underpowered for many tasks I think it show how the load really matters.


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## PacketMan (Jan 11, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> One word. Efficiency.
> While your server can preform the same task think of the power consumption difference between a specially designed packet switching ASIC and your general purpose CPU.
> The APU2 is a good example. It can do line speed gigabit ethernet no problem. But throw a couple of normal services on top like NAT and OpenSSL and all of a sudden your down to one third the throughput. Granted the APU is underpowered for many tasks I think it show how the load really matters.



Funny you should say that. I work on Cisco and Juniper for a living. What you said is exactly the message we have been preached for the last 20+ years.  Until now.  Now its "_consider virtualizing some of your switches and routers into your virtual machine data center_".  Obviously a Juniper MX2020 (https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/routing/mx-series/mx2020/) is not going to get virtualized in its "entire capability", but the industry sure is virtualizing the smaller routers, switches, and firewalls, but is also virtualizing some of the features found on the bigger 'iron' networking nodes.

https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/routing/mx-series/vmx/


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## SirDice (Jan 12, 2018)

PacketMan said:


> but the industry sure is virtualizing the smaller routers, switches, and firewalls, but is also virtualizing some of the features found on the bigger 'iron' networking nodes.


True, but these also run on "proper" virtualization hardware. There's quite a difference in running those images on a small system like the APU or running it as a virtual appliance on something like Dell/EMC's VxBlock.


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## PacketMan (Jan 12, 2018)

SirDice said:


> True, but these also run on "proper" virtualization hardware.


  Let's hope they all do that.


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## Max212 (Jan 12, 2018)

Different vendors have multiple offerings like:
 * Checkpoint: buy it as an appliance or as a software and than you do a bare metal deployment on your hardware
 * Juniper: buy it as an appliance or as a virtual machine
 * PF Sense: buy it as an appliance or as virtual machine or bare metal deployment

The question here is what are you expecting from product and what are you expecting from vendor.

For home usage/SOHO PF sense with snort is good solution. It is cheap and has low running costs.
But for enterprises, where you have to deploy and maintain 300, 600, 1000 or even more devices. Will you do that by hand or automate? How will you manage it, each device by hand or centrally with some management solution etc.

So everything boils down to what do you need, which solution solves most of your needs, what can you afford and how will you manage it (with all positive and negative sides that comes with some solution).


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