Question : Which firewall to choose?

So we are in the middle of rearching for a new firewall. we are replacing our old juniper NS25. We are moving into a new building and we will be implementing some voip and we will be testing an mpls with a total of 3 locations.

We hired a consulting company that seems to like sonicwalls products..

They have recommended to purchase a SonicWALL NSA 3500 their reason behind choosing this product is because it has great reporting capabilities and it has a throughput of 1.5gb stateful packet inspection which is a lot.

Im not familar with sonicwall products and i really dont care which firewall solution we go with so long it works.

After doing some research we found out on sonicwalls site that the 1.5gb number is a bechmark reached when no other service is running (kind of disappointing if you ask me) since i wont use a firewall just to do statul packet inpection.



I have 20 locations currently using netscreen 5gt and they are conntected via tunnels to my ns25.

3 of my sites are currently using agreesive mode to authenticate which sonicwall said is not supported (is this true)

Anyway.

at almost $4200 the sonicwall seems to be the choice for the firewall but i dont want to choose a product that is not going to work for my enviroment.

The other device is a juniper ssg 3200 gateway. which will cost about $5,300. from your personal experience why would i want to choose the sonicwall over the juniper besides saving 1k? I mean i really dont care about the saving part i just want to make sure that this is the best choice for our enviroment..


Note the consulting company said that we will need to keep the new and the old running side by side...

Also another company that is currently in carge or installing our new avaya phone systems has put some qoutes for us and has advice us not to mix hardware and that sonicwall does not handle qos very well which will cause packet loss and then we will have to replace our firewall.

HELP!!!!!!!!!

Answer : Which firewall to choose?

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