Juniper SRX 100 cheap Junos box, will it be great?
Juniper has produced an interesting niche product for a while now. The entry level firewall has been the Netscreen SSG5 for a while, but with their new line of boxes based on JunOS instead of ScreenOS, things are getting interesting again.
I just mentioned that I picked up an older 5gt for my home network, but I should have some SRX units in my lab soon. Previously, the way to run cheap junos was to use olive, but now you can buy a brand new JunOS firewall for about $500.
The really interesting bit is that the new SRX firewalls offer some serious throughput for the money. An SSG550 runs about 8k+ and offers gig speeds. An SRX240 offers gig at fraction of the cost. (You can pick up 2+ units for the cost of a 550.)
Meanwhile, I see a drawback to the SRX100. There’s simply no reason to offer measly 100Mb-TX ports on this box. Sure the SSG5 had em, but you have eight ports on the new unit. For remote sites, maybe I need Gig on a small LAN. So, what will happen? End users will put a SRX100 and put a cheap gig switch behind it. End the 100Mb tyranny!