Re: IPS Reliability/Availability

[Martin Roesch <roesch () sourcefire com>]

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Hi David,

You're referring to our IS 5800 chassis.  The 5800 is a carrier grade  
platform that uses a multiple PowerPC CPUs as the application  
processors.  It also uses a network processor for traffic management,  
load balancing, and several other capabilities as well as another PPC  
for systems management.  The system is fully fault tolerant, you can  
hot swap power supplies, network interface modules (NIMs), fan trays,  
hard drives and even processor boards without requiring a restart of  
the system.  The NIMs also offer power-off fail-open capability.   
Furthermore, the chassis is extensible, it's got a backplane  
connector so you can attach another chassis to it and distribute the  
applications and traffic across up to 8 more application CPUs (yep,  
14 CPUs of Snorting fury) so you've got some pretty significant  
investment protection as well because you don't need to get out your  
forklift to go to the "next step up platform" to get more  
performance, you just add computing power as needed and we can run  
all of our network-facing applications on it.

We have configurations that offer 2 or 6 CPUs for our applications  
right now and you can run intrusion detection, prevention or RNA in  
any combination you like on the device at the same time on it.  For  
example, you could have one chassis with 4 ports doing IPS, 2 ports  
doing IDS and 2 running RNA.

Performance is very good as well, multi-gig processing is available  
even in the 2 CPU configuration but obviously I don't have any third  
party testing to point to so you can take that for what it's worth.

     -Marty

- --
Martin Roesch - Founder/CTO, Sourcefire Inc. - +1-410-290-1616
Sourcefire - Security for the Real World - http://www.sourcefire.com
Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org




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