Samuel, The paloalto firewall by virtue of its advanced design performs all inspection in the first pass, by contrast an industry standard port based firewall must make multiple passes based on the degree of inspection. We use purpose build devices to achieve high levels of performance. In comparison many of the most popular firewalls out there are basically rewrapped pc’s with a tweaked OS. These boxes are fine for running a desktop operating system and playing games but mediocre in competing with a PAN. As an example, some firewalls will claim to do Application level filter but will require a blade to achieve this. This means that after the firewall as inspected it must now go through a second device in line with the firewall, this extra overhead has a costs in total performance. Paloalto builds their devices to perform these tasks out of the box, other vendors require additional hardware and software in an attempt to keep up. This is why we are called the next generation firewall. ~Phil
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