"What is the performance of this SRX5800
Services Gateway in the ‘real world'?" We're often asked this question,
and know that our customers are not often satisfied with our answer "it
depends".....
Building high-performance security products is a complex process, and the
products that result from that effort are complex devices. Thinking about
how to answer the above question has me thinking about another industry where
‘real world' performance is often a subject of discussion....
Take the high-performance car industry. A car manufacture may come out
with the latest super-car, and it will have amazing stats: 0-60mph in 4
seconds, the quarter mile in 11 seconds, and 190mph top speed. But those
statistics don't really answer the question as to how that car will perform on
a twisty road, or, to be more critical, on a race track. What would the
lap time of the above super car be on a specific race track?
The car manufactures have actually come to basically agree that one race track
in the world can be used to judge a car's actual, real world performance.
Germany's
Nurburgring is a 14 mile twisty devil of a race track. It has 172 corners, too
many for a driver to remember. Slow corners, fast straights, off camber
corners, shade, sunny, the Nurburgring has just about everything that can be
used to judge a race car (or family sedan, for that matter.) Jackie
Stewart, the famous race car driver, once called the Nürburgring "The Green
Hell."
High-performance firewalls are not that different from high-performance
cars. Juniper can provide lot's of detailed information about the
firewalls performance under "test conditions," such as packets per second
(PPS), new connections per second (KCPS), throughput (Gbps), etc., but these
only go so far at letting our users know how the system will perform in their
"real world."
Application layer traffic testing, such as that performed by BreakingPoint
Systems at Juniper recently on the SRX5800 Services Gateway, can go a long way
to illustrate the actual performance of the product under "real world"
circumstances. It's not a perfect scenario, but until we can develop a
set of tests that really put the firewall through the equivalent of the "green
hell" provided by the Nurburgring to car manufactures and enthusiasts, it'll
have to do.
Message Edited by GlenG on 03-05-2009 10:52 AM
Message Edited by GlenG on 03-05-2009 10:53 AM
Message Edited by ac on 04-17-2009 12:32 PM
aicasiano
on:
May 2012 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Summary
