Juniper SRX vs. WatchGuard XTM - Discontinued Product

SRXs seem to be well suited at the enterprise level for plain routers, firewalls, and IDP/IDS. They work well on MPLS and Ethernet, including Internet. I have 3 SRXs also performing edge duty, with 2 in a high availability (HA) cluster. The Juniper line of SRXs provides a good range of scaling from small business to extremely large enterprise. Wire speed is a common comparison factor and Juniper shines in that area.

Incentivized

WatchGuard XTM comes in different models, so you can choose the model best suited for your company size. I think it works well in small as well as very large networks. I have not used this feature, but you can create a "FireCluster" to connect member devices of the same model if you need to put multiple WatchGuard XTMs in your environment. Coming from command line, it took a little adjusting to learn which screen to use to set up the different rules. Once you understand how to set up policies, it is simple to create more. New firewall administrators would appreciate the ease of creating policies, and expert administrators should find everything they need plus extra features.

Incentivized

• Edge Device (Tunneling & Routing)
• Routing Instances
• Zone Based Firewall
• L3 Gateway/Vlan termination
• DHCP Server & DHCP Relay
• Good support community & Good available documentation
• Good support by the Vendor

Incentivized

• Proxy filter.
• Link redundancy.
• Security.

• My only real criticism of the product is that it's hard to figure out how to upgrade the firmware from the CLI via TFTP via the docs, but it works great once you get it sorted.

Incentivized

• Support can be hard to work with. While they are typically knowledgeable, there can be a language barrier. Also, most troubleshooting seems intrusive which is a problem in a production environment.
• The throughput of the cheaper models leaves something to be desired.
• Have had some issues running VOIP behind these, but have not been able to narrow down the issues to the phone provider or WatchGuard yet.

Incentivized

This is the one area where I have a beef with Juniper. When I called into Cisco TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I spoke with was able to resolve my issue. With Juniper TAC, 90% of the time, the first person I speak with is not able to resolve my issue, seems to almost be reading from a script, and must escalate my ticket. All of which takes time.

Incentivized

Juniper SRX stands tall compared to all these products for Large Service Provider Networks, where traffic volume is larger. Also, cost comparison with SRX's few other products can also be another contributing factor while selecting this. As well as Juniper Routers, Switches, and multiple products from the same vendor to maintain one single vendor environment. As well as Juniper Support is also really good.

Again, WatchGuard is priced much lower than other vendors in its space. It may not have some of the bigger features such as Layer 7 awareness. It's more simple to manage and provides IT staff the time to work on other tasks versus time spent to create complex rule sets.

Incentivized

• It is a workhorse for our field operations. It provides the last touch for an ISP to the customer. The customer has no view of the device, but with the repeatability of the device, they do not need to.
• The ability to roll out a dynamic routing protocol attached to a security zone allows elasticity to the environment that supports growth.
• VLAN support on the inside interfaces allow this to be the only device in some smaller deployments we install these in.

Incentivized

• Easy to set up and connect firewalls
• Easy to set up branch tunnels
• Less time spent training