topic Re: Firewall speed in Operating System - HP-UX

Firewall speed

Pierre Samson — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 13:29:36 GMT

If we have a T1 connection (1.54 Mbps)and put a firewall with 60 Mbps throughput for VPN, what would be the resulting effective speed of the connections? Would that be better than a VPN at 5Mbps?

And can someone indicate where I can get more technical info on this?

Thanks a lot

Re: Firewall speed

W.C. Epperson — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 15:59:32 GMT

This is the equivalent to "If I have a half-inch water pipe and I connect a 20-inch water main to it, how much water can I get through it?", so I doubt that you've asked the question you intended. Your throughput is going to be dependent on the slowest link in the path.

Now, water can't be compressed, and data can, but you certainly can't get anywhere close to 40x compression. Without compression, the throughput will be somewhat less than the T-1 speed, due to the VPN overhead. Our experience is that a 1Mbps link (cable modem) will yield about 200-300K throughput for VPN purposes, but I'm sure it depends on your VPN components.

Re: Firewall speed

Pierre Samson — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:17:22 GMT

I do agree, but let's say 40 users connect the agregate won't be more than 1.54 Mbps but the processing on the VPN engine could get to let say 10 Mbps of uncompress data?

See I don't get where the specs of VPN throughput are taken is it that it can process 60Mbps of data (uncompress, decrypth, process,crypth,compress) or what it listen to?

Am i confused? yeahh

Re: Firewall speed

W.C. Epperson — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 18:36:30 GMT

I don't know what kind of VPN you have, but I'd guess the specs mean that it could handle 60mbps if you could get that across your circuit. So you'd need a DS3 to get close.