Re: Info Request: Looking for alternatives in HA/Load balancing firewallsthat are also scalable and modular. . .

[David Lang <dlang () digitalinsight com>]

On Mon, 10 Apr 2006, Devdas Bhagat wrote:

> On 07/04/06 16:52 -0700, David Lang wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > 5TB/day is a sustained 60MB/sec (1 1/2 DS-3's or so), given that you have
> > a lot of peaks it's reasonable to say that your peak traffic is 2-3x that
> > value. you are still talking about ~200Mb/sec of traffic.
>
> Try 20-30x. 2MB is a _large_ email. I assume that the OP is already
> optimising by recipient domain(s) and hosts with multi-recipient
> messages. If the OP is lucky enough that the load can be distributed
> evenly, that would be a fairly rare case.
>
> Typical bulk mail traffic goes as one injection to a few thousand
> recipients, and then it fans out. Your sending speed is typically
> limited by the speed at which the remote host can accept mail, or by the
> pipe between the two of you. However, with multiple parallel messages,
> the choke is generally the network itself.
>
> > this is comfortably handled with a P-III intel platform (a Nokia 740
> > appliance is this amount of power)
> >
> > Sun has a checkpoint appliance that is Opteron based (defaults to 1.4GHz
> > processors, you can upgrade it) for about $30K. this is a very moderate
> > box by today's standard, but would handle the type of bandwidth
> > requirements you are talking about trivially
> >
> > > We have multiple OC's coming in, bandwidth isn't the immediate worry, it's
> > > throughput. . .
> >
> > again I need to ask for definitions. the best overall throughput is
> > generally achieved by spreading the load evenly and running things at max
> > capacity all the time. bandwidth requirements better represent your peak
> > requirements, but I think what you are looking for is responsivness (or
> > low latency). Even with that you should keep in mind that Internet use
>
> For mail delivery, the issue is throughput. Latencies are generally
> counted in minutes (or hours). Think B52 full of DVDs.

but if you can accept latencies of hours then you have a lot of leeway to 
spread your peaks out and your peak bandwidth can be far closer to your 
average bandwidth, so your statement that the peak is 20-30x the average 
doesn't sound reasonable.

what am I missing here?

David Lang


--
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no 
deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
 -- C.A.R. Hoare

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