"Well it occurred to me while playing with this very nice piece of gear from Cisco that really the $50k doesn’t actually buy you very much, in the not too distant past there was a huge gap in performance, features and reliability between Cisco gear and a commodity Linux server. This gap has gone Linux is now more reliable than IOS (so much so that Cisco use it in IOS-XE), the features found in IPTables and its flexibility blow IOS away, as for performance well a well equipped x86 server will outperform any Cisco router/firewall by a huge margin."
