RE: High Speed Firewalls

["Woeltje, Donald" <dwoeltje () sebh org>]

I'm sorry Rick, but it's not. When I priced BigIP, it was running over
$50,000 (depending on the licensing, as I remember; it's been a couple
years). At that same time, the Alteon ACESweitch 180 (with the ACElerate
software) came in at between $17,000 and $18,000. And the ACESwitch
performed 20 times faster, approximately. And it had all the same types of
load balancing features. It also outperformed Cisco's Load Director (or, and
I apologize to the group if I'm remembering the name a little incorrectly,
Cisco's Local Director; again, it's been a couple years) by an even greater
amount. Now, if I remember correctly, the Cisco solution was running in the
low $20k's, almost price competitive with the Layer 4 switches on the market
(including Alteon, which was the only Layer 4 switching product I tested).
But in my mind there was just no comparison, overall. Why pay more for less
when you can pay less for more?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Murphy [SMTP:rmurphy () mitretek org]
> Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2000 7:15 AM
> To:   Henry Baez; firewall-wizards () nfr net
> Subject:      Re: High Speed Firewalls
>
> At 10:51 AM 3/1/00 -0500, Henry Baez wrote:
> > I am doing research on very high speed firewalls.  I mean firewalls that
> > are right now available that could handle OC3 and higher speeds via Gig
> > Byte Etherenet cards.  In searching the recent posting of this list and
> > a lot of general web searching, I have found only one firewall that
> > claims they can do so.  It is call POTUS from a company called Livermore
> > Software Laboratories.  I would very much like to find at lease another
> > vendor which at lease matches the claim of PORTUS, 300 MB plus through
> > put.  Management, bless them, likes to have choices, I would like to
> > present more then one vendor if possiable.
>
> Since your requirement is for large bulk file transfers, I'd be wary - or 
> at least ask the vendor to let you validate their performance claims. If 
> I'm not mistaken, Portus uses a ftp proxy.  To get anything like 300 MB/s 
> through a proxy is going to use a really big hulking machine - especially 
> if you're talking a small number of FTP streams. Even 300 megabit/sec is 
> pretty unlikely unless it's a big box.
> I agree with the other folks that using a filtering router is probably the
>
> lowest cost solution for you.
>          -Rick