Watts up with power consumption?

Nokia, WatchGuard offer 'greenest' firewalls

The data center may seem a big place, but watts are watts: Every one you use costs you money. Two firewalls in a high-availability pair may not be the biggest power expense in a computer room, but that's no excuse to waste wattage.

In our "green factor" testing, we found that Nokia's and WatchGuard Technologies' UTM firewalls certainly know how to pass packets without wasting money: Both draw less than 1 amp. As the overall winner in this category, the Nokia IP290 pair we tested used 1.0 amps under load and barely slipped past WatchGuard's Firebox Peak devices, using 10% less power overall.

The IP290s are especially green because of their space and size. Nokia fits two half-wide boxes in a single 1U mounting bracket. That's downright elegant, especially compared with some of the other devices we tested. In fact, two Nokia IP290 firewalls weigh less than the rack-mount kit for the Secure Computing Sidewinder UTMs. When you upgrade and replace your firewalls at the end of a five-year life cycle, you're going to be throwing out a lot more finished product that had to be mined, manufactured, shipped and ultimately recycled.

Network World - The data center may seem a big place, but watts are watts: Every one you use costs you money. Two firewalls in a high-availability pair may not be the biggest power expense in a computer room, but that's no excuse to waste wattage.

In our "green factor" testing, we found that Nokia's and WatchGuard Technologies' UTM firewalls certainly know how to pass packets without wasting money: Both draw less than 1 amp. As the overall winner in this category, the Nokia IP290 pair we tested used 1.0 amps under load and barely slipped past WatchGuard's Firebox Peak devices, using 10% less power overall.

The IP290s are especially green because of their space and size. Nokia fits two half-wide boxes in a single 1U mounting bracket. That's downright elegant, especially compared with some of the other devices we tested. In fact, two Nokia IP290 firewalls weigh less than the rack-mount kit for the Secure Computing Sidewinder UTMs. When you upgrade and replace your firewalls at the end of a five-year life cycle, you're going to be throwing out a lot more finished product that had to be mined, manufactured, shipped and ultimately recycled.

In the doghouse for their high power use were the general-purpose servers from IBM (running Check Point software) and Secure Computing (running on Dell hardware), which pulled down 7.7 amps to 6.3 amps in our tests (and emitting a similarly disproportionate number of BTUs). The custom-built IBM Internet Security Systems' Proventia MX5010 also weighed in heavily in this category, pulling down 5.5 amps.