I'm sorry Rick, but it's not. When I priced BigIP, it was running over
$50,000 (depending on the licensing, as I remember; it's been a couple
years). At that same time, the Alteon ACESweitch 180 (with the ACElerate
software) came in at between $17,000 and $18,000. And the ACESwitch
performed 20 times faster, approximately. And it had all the same types of
load balancing features. It also outperformed Cisco's Load Director (or, and
I apologize to the group if I'm remembering the name a little incorrectly,
Cisco's Local Director; again, it's been a couple years) by an even greater
amount. Now, if I remember correctly, the Cisco solution was running in the
low $20k's, almost price competitive with the Layer 4 switches on the market
(including Alteon, which was the only Layer 4 switching product I tested).
But in my mind there was just no comparison, overall. Why pay more for less
when you can pay less for more?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rick Murphy [SMTP:rmurphy_at_mitretek.org]
> Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2000 7:15 AM
> To: Henry Baez; firewall-wizards_at_nfr.net
> Subject: Re: High Speed Firewalls
>
> 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
Received on Mar 03 2000
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