Who's got the fastest firewall - Crossbeam, IBM?

When we tested firewall performance as part of in our UTM firewall test we focused on how well the products would push inspected packets along with other UTM features, specifically intrusion-prevention systems and antivirus, turned on. However, many enterprise managers will use these devices primarily just as firewalls, and might be curious how fast they'd operate without UTM slowing them down.

Our initial test bed had been tuned for 1Gbps throughput, and eight of the 13 firewalls we tested blew right past the 1Gbps mark without UTM turned on. So, with the help of David Newman from Network Test, we outfitted the test bed with a 2.8Gbps capacity, and re-ran our firewalls through at that higher speed.

This second round of testing employed the same product configurations used for the 1Gbps UTM test with two exceptions. WatchGuard and Secure Computing have long offered proxy-based firewalls, claiming higher security than simple packet filters although with a cost in performance. WatchGuard's Firebox and Secure Computing's Sidewinder have the flexibility to use either simple packet filters, a generic proxy or an HTTP-specific proxy for HTTP traffic. Since our tests were made using HTTP traffic, we tested all three scenarios and reported all three numbers for each product.