In some recent design situations, I’ve spent some time looking at routers and firewalls, looking for some fairly hefty performance characteristics. That’s where it became quite clear (if it wasn’t clear enough already), that router and firewall performance costs a lot more, compared to switches. As covered in the previous blog.
This blog discusses the related topic of finding the router or firewall model with the right performance, for situations where more than relatively low-cost speed is needed.
ROUTER THROUGHPUT
I keep encountering people who seem to think that since their Cisco ISR 4K router has a couple of 1 Gbps interfaces, it will do 1 Gbps of GigE to GigE forwarding (routing). Bzzzt, wrong! Probably not, depending on the model! The standard consulting answer applies: “it depends” and “don’t assume.”
