Storming the Network Gates

摘要

Never has the firewall been asked to do so much. Although firewalls have long offered extras, such as the ability to do VPN processing and content filtering, today vendors are throwing in the kitchen sink, including virus and spam filtering and even intrusion detection and prevention. Putting all of these functions into one box and behind one management interface sounds like a winning idea, but what happens to firewall performance when you turn all of these services on? That was one question I wanted to answer when I tested two full-featured firewalls, Fortinet's FortiGate 800 and ServGate's EdgeForce Accel, at Spirent Communications' lab in Calabasas, Calif.