Re: High Speed Firewalls

[Rick Murphy <rmurphy () mitretek org>]

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