Conclusions - Compaq 117755-003 - ProSignia - 740 White Paper

278A/0497
W P
HITE APER
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For hardware configurable tests, upgrading the Network Interface Cards from the EISA bus to the
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PCI bus resulted in noticeable increases in performance. The processor scales well when moving
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. . from one processor to two processors, making appreciable increases in performance and
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increased performance as the load increases. Increasing memory adds slight performance
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increases. The drive controller tests from EISA Smart-2 Array Controller Raid 0, PCI Smart-2
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Array Controller Raid 0 and Raid 5, and ON BOARD PCI Controller gave expected results and
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minimal performance increases because of performance enhancements made to the firewall to
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allow log file writes to be done in batch processes instead of writing log file information for every
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event. Network speed also gave expected results when going from a 100Mb network to 10Mb
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network. The firewall was able handle throughput of more than 10Mb for both HTTP/FTP and
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HTTP only transfers.
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Software configurable tests with HTTP Cache on drew expected increases in performance in both
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. . HTTP/FTP and HTTP only tests. This software switch is turned on by default in SmartStart
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installations of Raptor's Eagle NT 3.06 product to give higher performance using the cache from
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the time of installation. No DNS Lookups for HTTP displayed slight performance increases for
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FTP/HTTP transfers but presented high performance increases for greater loads on HTTP Only
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tests. Expected decreases were noticed in both HTTP/FTP and HTTP only test runs when not
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using HTTP caching of rules.
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Differences between HTTP/FTP and HTTP only transfers displayed enormous performance
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increases for HTTP only transfers showing the added performance enhancements included in
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Raptor's Eagle NT 3.06 firewall product.
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This paper gives information about performance enhancements for firewalls using various
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hardware and software components also take into account the protection and security gained by
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using a firewall and should notice that there is a performance hit in using a firewall for any
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environment. As a result, using Compaq servers and adding specific hardware and software
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components can reduce this performance hit dramatically while increasing overall performance of
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the firewall for your environment.
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