This was a price I received directly from a vendor who isn't Cisco or Brocade at a trade show. I honestly don't remember who because I lost interest, but I believe it was Black Lotus. It was priced per gigabit, and we needed ten. ~$12,000/gigabit, $120,000 device. Someone from Black Lotus can feel free to correct me. I was uninterested in negotiations from the get-go based on that ballpark, so if what you say is true, these vendors are doing themselves a disservice by talking me out of investigating them further simply based on a ballpark price. I also wasn't pricing routers, I was pricing mitigation gear. Cisco discontinued theirs, didn't they? The Guard? I seem to recall an admin who deployed Guards telling me they were (are?) six figures as well.

I worked for a serious buyer when I had this casual conversation with the vendor. You do business with my former employer (I've spoken to you before, when you took over cia.vc). I'd consider those facilities "real" datacenters, and they're certainly the same size, if not significantly larger, than your hosting outfit. No need to appeal to authority with me, honestly, I think we're on the same page -- I think your comment misread me as pricing routers instead of mitigation gear.

As for flows, I was interested in a solution that I didn't have to write software to implement. I'd rather have a supported appliance that can handle figuring out DoS attacks itself, rather than me parsing flows and feeding that information back. That way, if the software doesn't work, I can blame somebody else rather than me. My time is precious. Yours sounds less so, and that's your prerogative.