So, the more I look at various ways to lay out my infrastructure, the more I am thinking about specs for hardware.
Starting with firewalling.
How does one determine the specs for a firewall?
What I mean is:
1. motherboard/CPU - p4? Dual-Core? Intel i3, i5, i7?
2. RAM? 4gb? 8gb? More? 32gb?
3. Obviously GB Nics!
I am bring about 300gb of traffic a month right now and I expect that to increase significantly with my next offerings.
Obviously one answer is to but a beefy motherboard that supports lots of RAM and add more as needed, but where does one start out?
How do I know if my firewall would need more RAM?
How do I know if the CPU is good enough?
I still go back to my Cisco PIX days where these devices were amazing on just 256MB of RAM. We piloted a large chunk of Cornell University's Lab Of Ornithology on 2 of these, but now-a-days it seems that a PIX would not be good enough. Is it because the nature of the internet and data and attacks has changed over time? more aggressive?
-Jason