[CentOS] Theoretical Firewall Specs?

Tue Jan 17 23:36:09 UTC 2012
Jason T. Slack-Moehrle <slackmoehrle at gmail.com>

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