[fw-wiz] RE: Re: Proverbial appliance vs software based firewall

From: Stephen Gill (gillsrat_private)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 13:03:09 PDT

  • Next message: Stephen Gill: "[fw-wiz] RE: CERT vulnerability note VU# 539363"

    I guess CP is running on Linux.  I didn’t realize the report stated
    secure platform.
    
    -- steve
    
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Stephen Gill [mailto:gillsrat_private] 
    Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 2:41 PM
    To: 'pjklistat_private'; 'firewall-wizardsat_private'
    Subject: Re: Proverbial appliance vs software based firewall
    
    Guns for hire indeed.  I noticed that the report states CP was running
    on a 2.4 Ghz XEON with 1GB RAM though no word on what OS.  How can you
    compare the fastest hardware of one vendor to the medium solution of
    another?  Also, what are the monetary costs associated with each of the
    products evaluated?  
     
    -sigh-
     
    -- steve
     
    -----------------
    > Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 04:43:49 -0400 (EDT) 
    > From: Christopher Hicks <chicks_at_chicks.net> 
    > 
    > On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Ryan M. Ferris wrote: 
    > 
    > > Gigabit throughput is still best achieved by a switched bus
    architecture 
    > > and custom ASICS or other real-time micro-kernel OS. The shared bus 
    > > archictecture of even the fastest PCS and gigabit NICs will never be
    a 
    > > match for dedicated hardware in processing traffic. 
    > 
    > Bull. I heard the same things about 10M and 100M. PC's will catch up. 
    The classic argument seems to be that dedicated-ASIC-based 
    firewalls have at least a theoretical performance advantage. 
    Various people have been saying, for example, that Checkpoint's 
    days are numbered because stuff like Netscreen performs much 
    better. 
    Now Checkpoint has commissioned a test that purports to show 
    their product performs better than "dedicated hardware" from 
    Cisco and Netscreen. I would like to have people's opinion 
    on this test, in part because my observation of Tolly Group 
    test reports is that they're one of these "guns for hire" 
    that never writes a bad review for someone who pays them for 
    one. 
    I just skimmed through it and one thing that stuck out in one 
    of the tests was that they were testing only UDP traffic, which 
    struck me a bit strange because that has to be a small part of 
    typical VPN traffic. 
    http://www.checkpoint.com/products/connect/tollyreport.html 
      
    --
    Philip J. Koenig                                      
    pjklist_at_ekahuna.com
    Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New
    Millenium
     
    
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