There is another issue. Intel/Intel clone based products come in all shapes
and sizes but mostly are designed for minimum buy price and maximum volume
sale. That means they tend to a lot of 'value engineering' which for some
vendors means "if the customers wont notice how about taking this
functionality out and not telling them". Even the best vendors arent that
good at advising of planned changes to design. All of this can be a real
problem for any secure or mission critical system like a firewall and can
cause a lot of grief for the PBC (poor bloody customer).
Folk like Sun tend to be much better at telling folk about planned changes
and documenting what they have done. They arent perfect but they are usualy
better. Some Intel vendors would say thats just because they dont shift much
tin, but if they offer a better product/service, who cares what the reason
is. Anyway lower volume sales can be explained in many ways. It can simply
be that there are fewer wise buyers out there and lots of people who dont
know any better than to buy cheapest product.
Ian J-B
----------
From: firewalls-owner
To: Mike.Jones
Cc: firewalls
Subject: Re: PC vs Workstation Firewall
Date: Thursday, November 02, 1995 1:49PM
My mailer thinks Mike Jonesa said:
>
[chomp]
>
> Actually, I think there's another issue to consider. If you get, for
> example, a firewall that runs on a Sun, you can purchase maintenance
> for it. That means that if you lose a disk at 2am in a snowstorm in the
> middle of January, the *Sun* guy gets to come out and replace the disk
> within 4 hours. Sure beats playing with PC hardware for my dollar. The
> same is true of HP, SGI, IBM, etc., of course.
>
Actually, the amount you pay in maintenance could probably be put into
buying spares for everything. This would alleviate the Sun Engineer from
having to come out - only you would need to go out. After all you were
there to let him into the building and onto the bastion, weren't you?
:-)
Colin
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