Rational Survivability

[Ed: I want to add something here…I think people should pay
attention to Cobia for lots of reasons; some of them are apparent and
others cause eyebrows and shoulders to shrug.  Just like when Astaro
announced their "Virtual Security Appliance" that I barfed all over because of egregiously overarching claims to revolutionary impact in the security market, one must consider the audience and motivation for creating a "product" like this.

I think folks should pay attention to Cobia because it continues
to provoke discussion and debate surrounding where, how and why
security is positioned in the network not to mention stirring interesting discussions regarding the definition of Open Source…]

—

Look, I think Cobia is compelling, creative, valuable and very interesting and I think people should pay attention to it.  I think it’s a great idea and I know that Mitchell, Alan and Martin (and the rest of the team) will make it successful.

Alan’s statements to the contrary are just wrong and are overly controversial — unfortunately at the expense of a reasonable debate on an issue central to security today.  I love him, but I suggest he needs Ritalin today!

The SME/SMB market is ripe for this sort of utility, but again, while the packaging and components are put together in new and interesting ways, the underlying framework is not.  That’s not a bad thing, but again, forging yet another market classification in an already fractured industry is potentially difficult for everyone.

The WhistleJet from 1999 was a very similar model.  Sure, it wasn’t open source and it didn’t run on a VM, but it was a very similar model.

I really didn’t want to bring up this point, because it seems contrived and snarky at this point, but it’s interesting that much of what is being presented with Cobia is already done in our boxes.  I have no interest in starting a pissing match because there’s no reason to as Cobia serves a different marketspace than we do and blending utility applications (even though we can) with dedicated security applications isn’t in our interest or business model.

Mitchell even sees some value in running Cobia on Crossbeam. 

Again, I think Cobia is an interesting idea and well-timed for the SME/SMB.  I think it’s very cool and if you’re in the market for this solution you should definitely look at it.

I’m done arguing about something I wasn’t arguing about in the first place.

/Hoff