Review: Who's got the fastest firewall?

Crossbeam, IBM win raw performance test; Juniper, Watchguard score on price/performance

When we tested firewall performance as part of in our UTM firewall test we focused on how well the products would push inspected packets along with other UTM features, specifically intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus, turned on. However, many enterprise managers will use these devices primarily just as firewalls, and might be curious how fast they’d operate without UTM slowing them down.

Our initial test bed had been tuned for 1Gbps throughput, and eight of the 13 firewalls we tested blew right past the 1Gbps mark without UTM turned on. So, with the help of David Newman from Network Test, we outfitted the test bed with a 2.8Gbps capacity, and re-ran our firewalls through at that higher speed.

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When we tested firewall performance as part of in our UTM firewall test we focused on how well the products would push inspected packets along with other UTM features, specifically intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus, turned on. However, many enterprise managers will use these devices primarily just as firewalls, and might be curious how fast they’d operate without UTM slowing them down.

Our initial test bed had been tuned for 1Gbps throughput, and eight of the 13 firewalls we tested blew right past the 1Gbps mark without UTM turned on. So, with the help of David Newman from Network Test, we outfitted the test bed with a 2.8Gbps capacity, and re-ran our firewalls through at that higher speed.

This second round of testing employed the same product configurations used for the 1Gbps UTM test with two exceptions. WatchGuard and Secure Computing have long offered proxy-based firewalls, claiming higher security than simple packet filters although with a cost in performance. WatchGuard’s Firebox and Secure Computing’s Sidewinder have the flexibility to use either simple packet filters, a generic proxy or an HTTP-specific proxy for HTTP traffic. Since our tests were made using HTTP traffic, we tested all three scenarios and reported all three numbers for each product.

Overall, we found that if you don’t want to turn on any of the UTM features, you can get outstanding performance with almost half of the boxes we tested running at more than gigabit speeds. Even better news is that some of those high-performance boxes (namely Juniper SSG-520M and WatchGuard’s Firebox Peak X8500e) are offered (we say almost) at a great price. (You can compare pricing for dozens of UTM products in our UTM Buyer's Guide.)