Re: Firewalling High Speed Interfaces (ATM -> GigE)

[Richard Fifarek <rfifarek@silug.org>]

Regarding the x86, they do use PIIIs:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/fw/sqfw500/prodlit/535_ds.htm

Based on the specs it appears that they use 64 bit PCI slots to get the 
1Gbps speed though.

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Mark Bishop wrote:

> 
> 
> Here are a few assumptions:
> 
> the PCI bus can only handle around 500MB/s, then add the overhead of the
> firewall and that goes down, unless of course you are using one of the new
> PCI-X standards, which is 64-bit and can handle bursts of up over 1
> gigabit/sec (1066MB/sec).  Something like a dual or a quad Xeon should be
> able to handle it.  I'd probably go with a quad just to ensure that the
> processors are never the bottleneck and that it's the latency in the PCI
> bus, which you really can't do anything about.
> 
> But, again I'd probably go get a Cisco, just because they are more adapt 
> at doing just this thing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Richard Fifarek wrote:
> 
> > 	The folks that I work for want to place a firewall between us and
> > the "outside world" to help minimize our exposure.  We have an ATM OC-3
> > (155 Mb/s) link currently, and eventually that will be expanded to GigE.  
> > My question is with a fairly vanilla firewall set (allow Ssh, HTTP/HTTPS, 
> > SMTP, FTP; disallow everything else), what kind of horse power will this 
> > require?  What kind of lag can I expect?  At OC-3 speeds, I'm guessing 
> > that most machines could handle the load, however when it jumps up to 
> > GigE, I expect problems.  With 2.4 supporting threaded IP stack, SMP makes 
> > sense 2-4 processors.  Would Xeon's extra cache make a difference?
> > 
> > 	     -----------------------------------------------------
> > 	     Richard H. Fifarek	       		rfifarek@silug.org
> >              -----------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
> 
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	     -----------------------------------------------------
	     Richard H. Fifarek	       		rfifarek@silug.org
             -----------------------------------------------------


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