Business Case: Infrastructure Update

[Stevehewitt]

Hi all,

Been at a new company for about 3 weeks now, really enjoying it as an "infrastructure administrator".

A lot of the infrastrucutre is pretty good, WMWare for the majority of servers, couple of SAN's, a NAS etc. However the firewall is 8 years old, and the main company router is a Win2k3 server running RRAS!

One of the things the IT Manager has asked me to look at replacing is the aging firewall. Whilst I agree that an 8 year old, out of support firewall should be replaced, I'm struggling to do a decent CAPEX business case for it. We aren't looking for UTM or anything special - just a standard firewall. Which our current box does alright - so how do I justify the expense...?!

Any hints appreciated!

Cheers,




Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[edfair]

I would suspect that it is an "out of hardware support" single point of failure for outside access. It might be time to place it into the active reserve force, retired but still available for emergencies.
I'm not much into this stuff but the last time a customer had me involved it was 3 days getting 2 SonicWalls talking and the PIIXs they were paralleling were mo longer supported by the original supplier.

 

[AndrewTait]

Better to do it now whilst the old one is still doing it's job than wait until it dies, and then have to bodge something together, and never get it right.

Out of maintenance should be a good enough reason.

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I got to the edge of sanity....then i fell off
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