ASA vs. Sonicwall

[lcaruso]

Hi,

I'm in a situation where we are trying to convince a client to switch from their Sonicwall NSA 3500 to an ASA 5585-X. The need is bandwidth. One issue that keeps coming up is the Sonicwall tries to be the swiss army knife of security devices with all of its features, some of which are clearly inadequate (VPN, IPS, etc).

Our next client interaction will boil down to if the 5585-X and the NSA E6500 are approximately the same price, why should they purchase the ASA when they get so many more features in the Sonicwall?

We know the 5585-X is the way to go, but putting it accurately into words is  a challenge.

I'm looking for good comparisons to make and helpful suggestions.

Here is their feature set

antispyware
intrusion
     prevention
antivirus
     gateway
application
     firewall 
content Filter

The ASA 5585-X doesn't have antispyware, antivirus, but I don't know exactly what to say about application firewall and content filter.

[varrao]

Hi Icaruso,

Well on this forum we can only tell you about the feature set of the Cisco ASA 5580 but not sure about the sonic firewall. The feature set that you are talking about is also present on the ASA:

For Intrusion Prevention, we have an IPS module which gets inserted into the ASA 5580 chassis

For antispyware and content filtering you can get a CSC module, which is also connected into the ASA 5580 chassis.

For more details about ASA 5580 I would suggest you go through the datasheet of the product and do the comparison:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/prod/collateral/vpndevc/ps6032/ps6094/ps6120/product_data_sheet0900aecd802930c5.html

Moreover with Cisco products you also get a very efficient and helpful TAC which is definitely quite unbeatable

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Varun

[Maykol Rojas]

Hello,

Unfortunately, the solution for IPS and CSC should be on a separate solution. The ASA 5580 does not support IPS modules:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2010688

As mentioned on the post, for better performance, since the ASA 5580 runs with 10 Gig interfaces, you should buy an IPS solution to satisfied the needs of the network. Not pretty sure with the CSC, but I am affraid that is not supported as well.

Mike.