A good old fashioned flame war

You have to love it when a tech guy and a marketing guy from two competitors get into it.  That it appears, is exactly what is going with Chris Hoff, who make no mistake about it, works for Crossbeam Systems and Alex Neihaus, from Astaro.  It seems some nerves have been touched and now it is personal.  Chris's original post was about Astaro's new VM appliance (something we have been doing for months with our SG Free).  I think Chris was trying to get the point across that there is vitalization and then there is VMWare and there is a scalability difference.  The point was it may be fine for SMB type markets, but it would not fly in the enterprise or carrier class world. Well, it seems this got Alex's  goat a bit and he responded with a rather personal attack on Chris.  Chris then in turn responded to Alex with a post, that I have to admit, had me chuckling quite a bit. My favorite is this one:

"Also, this ain't my first ride on a tuna boat, pal.  While I haven't had the privilege of peddling FTP software for a living, I know a thing or two about security -- designing, deploying, managing and using it.  As I mentioned in the comments I sent you, everyone's a dog on the Internet, Alex, and you're pissing on the wrong hydrant."

All kidding and personal flames aside, I think this "debate" raises some great questions that we have grappled with here for a long time.  Like Astaro, we have explored and released products in a VMWare appliance.  Our experience with our free Strata Guard IPS, is that this kicked downloads up into a higher gear.  However, I don't know if it would fly in the enterprise or even the MSSP market. I have questions about running security applications in a shared environment.  Also, like Astaro, we have resisted the movement towards an ASIC solution and use standard, off the shelf hardware.  We think recent improvements in the CPU and buses on these systems will yield great results.  However, selling one security application on a box is different than a UTM device.  UTM's can eat up CPU cycles pretty quickly.  Again like Astaro, we use a fair bit of open source components for OS and database and such, however, I think we probably have a little bit more of our our own IP in our suite.  On the other hand, Chris is I think right about what the high end market wants and his questions around how do you position a VMWare appliance in an enterprise network and what type of platform this would need are valid questions, that need to be answered before we would take this approach as a serious contender for anything but smaller networks.

I guess the market will determine who is right here, I suspect that both sides have some valid points and as usual, as there always is in these kind of things, there is one side, the other and somewhere in between the truth.