Hardware

We are an ISP that has throughput surpassing 500Mbps on some VLANs.  I would like to pull our ACL's off our Cisco Catalyst and onto m0n0wall to relieve the load on the Catalyst and also take advantage of the flexibility and features of m0n0wall.

I am concerned about two points, throughput and stability.  Can anyone recommend hardware, preferably that will fit in 1U that can meet my needs with m0n0wall?

It's not 1U and it's not real world, but if memory serves me I was getting throughput around 760Mbps full duplex on iperf with a Sempron 2800+ (1.6GHz), ASUS M2NBP-VM CSM (onboard nvidia GBE), Intel Pro 1000 PT pci-e. The cpu was maxed during the test. That was through a pair of bridged interfaces too. I don't remember the throughput using NAT, but obviously it was lower.

Substitute the 1000 PT with a 1000 GT pci card and my numbers were lower, around 400Mbps, presumably because of pci bus saturation, as the cpu was ~70%. Interestingly, device polling made no noticeable difference on throughput in my tests.

May I take advantage of this moment to plug my comment and poll on hardware benchmarking? I think I'll link to it every time I answer a question like this. Please check it out.

http://forum.m0n0.ch/index.php/topic,875.0.html

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