How we did it

We worked with Spirent's SmartBits team to develop the benchmark tests used in this review, Our test rig connected a 20-port SmartBits 2000 test system through an Extreme Networks Summit 48 switch to each firewall. On the other side of the firewall, we had a matched set, another Extreme Summit 48 and another 20-port SmartBits 2000. Some firewalls act as bridges rather than routers. In those cases, we used a 3COM PathBuilder S580 as an IP router to handle the routing.

Half the products we tested came with their own hardware. For the other half, we used a standard dual-CPU Pentium III 650 MHz system with 512 Mbytes of memory as the test platform.

Once we set the firewall into the test rig, we used a combination of off-the-shelf tools from Spirent, including SmartFlow and SmartTCP, and custom-written TCP test tools, to run our 21 separate tests on each product. Since multiple runs were needed to validate the throughput data, we ended up running 72 tests on each product.