Comparison Shopping for Scalable Firewall Products

No Network Designer worth their salt would dream of purchasing a router or switch without demanding benchmark test results on throughput and subscription rates. After all, routers and switches represent choke points on the network where over-subscription can reduce a gigabit backbone to 10mbs crawl due to failed connections or latency caused by re-transmittal of lost packets. A really poorly chosen exterior router or switch can even cause a cascade failure of the entire network by propagating, or failing to contain, broadcast storms. At best, an over-subscribed exterior device will choke Internet connections and waste money paid for expensive bandwidth.