Re: [Full-disclosure] Suggestion for IDS

["Paul S. Brown" <pol@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 28 September 2005 16:56, Michael Holstein wrote:
> > If you NAT a lot, PIX can't handle the load.  It also isn't flexible
> > enough.
>
> Huh? .. the FWSM (which is PIX and you can have 4 of them in a chassis)
> can handle 100 intefaces, 5gpbs, 100k CPS, and 1M concurrent per blade.
>
> http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps2706/ps4452/
>
> Show me an OpenBSD system that can handle 400 interfaces, 20gbps, and 4M
> connections (and can do HSRP, etc).
>
> (I'm not trying to start an open-source "holy war" on a newsgrop .. I
> use pf too, where I need the granularity -- just not on the whole network).

I suspect the argument here has to be cost-for-cost - in the price range for a 
decent beefy OpenBSD box you aren't going to be using FWSMs, and I can quite 
believe that the PIXen in that price range don't perform - the PIX 501 is 
specced at 60MB/s throughput and the cheapest retail price I can find for it 
is $678 for the unlimited license version - for the same money you can get a 
beefy PC which will push quite a bit more than 60MB/s

FWSMs appear to retail around $23,000 - that's on top of the 6500 chassis and 
line cards you need to use it - not exactly a fair comparison.

For that money you could quite easily put together a farm of boxes that would 
exceed 5GB/s throughput aggregate - whether you'd want to is a different 
question.


P.
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