Who rated this post

Best appliance, I can't answer, but no appliance can hold a candle to a VM on a host with decent NVMe storage. Even with 1:2 lane oversubscription, PCIe 4 NVMe drives can manage ~3.2 GB/s each. PCIe 5 drives (which are available now) can do ~6.5 GB/s with just two lanes. Assuming perfect throughput scaling, it would take six SATA SSDs with no redundancy to keep up with a two-lane PCIe 4 NVMe drive or twelve SATA SSDs to keep up with a single two-lane PCIe 5 NVMe drive. Again, that's with zero redundancy, so if you lose a drive, you lose the set. And there are systems which can take 24 PCIe 5 NVMe drives without oversubscription. Even with the virtualization hit to I/O performance, that advantage is too big to overcome.

I've never found Check Point's branded boxes a good value, but the firewall boxes are at least halfway tolerable. The management servers are a decade out of date.