I am looking into alternatives to commercial firewall appliances.
Most of the resources available online describe home network firewalls or sub-gigabit networks. Considering than 10GbE is becoming the standard server connectivity, would it be possible to reach the same level of performance than specialised appliances using whiteboxes ?
The question is specific to the datacenter environment, which means:
- Server grade hardware
- 10 to 40GbE network
Additional requirements:
- OpenSource operating systems
- OpenSource firewalling software
I know that getting 10 Gbps out of a server is already pretty tough but is it possible to filter this amount of traffic without using specialized hardware ?
Would the latency be equivalent or at least in same order of magnitude than commercial appliances ?
Does some of you run this kind of setup in production ?
What are the pitfalls and things to know before starting ?
I rewrote the original question which was way to narrow:
Is it possible to run a firewall based on OpenBSD, in a datacenter network (10GbE or more) and get the same or better latency/bandwidth than appliances like Cisco ASA, Juniper SRX, etc...
Most of the resources available online describe home network firewalls or sub-gigabit networks
- Really?