Now Thats Bandwidth!
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Not sure where to post this, hope this is the right spot. Working on this project at work and can't go into details. We have a Metro Ethernet circuit 300Mbps. I recommended we build a PfSense Box as the router/firewall. So I built the box out of a Dell OptiPlex 745 which is a core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and a 80 GB Hard Drive. The NIC I added is a Trendnet Gbps card it uses a realtek chipset and the built-in NIC is a Broadcom Gb card. Any who, I ran a bandwidth test and thought you guys would enjoy the Pic. The leader of the project wants to go all Cisco but I'm trying my hardest to change their minds as Cisco gear will cost us $5K dollars easy and I wanted to take a small portion of that money and donate it to the PfSense team. I will update if I am successful.
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Awesome! Now that's what i call personally a very good setup and bandwidth. Thank you for sharing this pic with us and special thanks to pfSense Team!
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NIce!
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very nice indeed. THOUGH i would ditch that realtek card as fast as possible.
with that fast of a connection , i wouldnt be using that card.
if you want reliability use Intel Nics.i have NO experience with the broadcom nics at all.
Best of luck to ya…
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Supermule mocking us with your sig. still I see! ::)
Steve
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Not sure where to post this, hope this is the right spot. Working on this project at work and can't go into details. We have a Metro Ethernet circuit 300Mbps. I recommended we build a PfSense Box as the router/firewall. So I built the box out of a Dell OptiPlex 745 which is a core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM and a 80 GB Hard Drive. The NIC I added is a Trendnet Gbps card it uses a realtek chipset and the built-in NIC is a Broadcom Gb card. Any who, I ran a bandwidth test and thought you guys would enjoy the Pic. The leader of the project wants to go all Cisco but I'm trying my hardest to change their minds as Cisco gear will cost us $5K dollars easy and I wanted to take a small portion of that money and donate it to the PfSense team. I will update if I am successful.
Cisco equipment to handle a 300/300 connection will run you far more than $5K.
If you do go with pfSense, make sure you invest in decent hardware and go with a pair of boxes in CARP. If your company is investing in a 300Mbit/s connection then uptime is probably important as well. $2-3K total could get you a pair of nice 1U boxes.
I've been looking at these recently to potentially replace my boxes from Lanner. They support ECC memory and have 4 built-in Intel Gig-E ports (plus a dedicated IPMI port) plus an expansion slot that could get me 4 more Gig-E ports or a pair of 10Gbe ports. They run about $1000 each, so two of those, two 8 GB SATA DOMs, and 8GB of RAM per box puts me at around $2600 for the setup. The only thing holding me back is that I'm not sure that the drive controller will be supported, which would put a real roadblock into my project.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1u/5017/sys-5017p-tln4f.cfm
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If you're looking to put in a firewall, yeah you're going to spend far more than $5K USD on a Cisco ASA to get something with pretty solid scalability. Depends on what you're looking to do with the connection, but you may want the ability to scale up to millions of simultaneous connections (if you don't want it now, the first time you get hit with a DoS attack and your ASA melts down you will). That'll cost you into 6 figures for a single ASA, or the cost of ~3-4 GB RAM (3-4 million connections) with pfSense.
That hardware is fine for a proof of concept, but get some real server grade gear or a higher end appliance platform if you're going into production with that.
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Reusing old AT boxes (new ones are not very expensive, but a box is a box and I had old ones), I bought parts to build the system in my sig for ballpark $650. Two built-in intel NICs and a third intel NIC plugged in.
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I've been looking at these recently to potentially replace my boxes from Lanner. They support ECC memory and have 4 built-in Intel Gig-E ports (plus a dedicated IPMI port) plus an expansion slot that could get me 4 more Gig-E ports or a pair of 10Gbe ports. They run about $1000 each, so two of those, two 8 GB SATA DOMs, and 8GB of RAM per box puts me at around $2600 for the setup. The only thing holding me back is that I'm not sure that the drive controller will be supported, which would put a real roadblock into my project.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1u/5017/sys-5017p-tln4f.cfm
Jason did you get to test out one of these?
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Nope, a bunch of development stuff came up to occupy my time and my support staff is occupied with day-to-day troubleshooting, new hires, etc., and having them replace perfectly good hardware isn't high on the list when I've got a rack where every switch needs replacement (some defective, some full, some ancient).
