Firewall for a High-bandwidth server
I have a very robust Windows 2003 Server that's being used for video streaming. This server is located in a datacenter and servers up to 800 simultaneous streams at 100k each. So where talking about 80 mbit/sec. That's a massive amount of traffic. I'm currently searching for a firewall solution for this server.
I know that many people will say: you should use hardware firewall on those servers. Yeah, I know that some people claim that hardware firewalls provide better security. But I have one major problem: those two servers are doing streaming to several simultaneous users. I mean several (hundreds). So I don't want to have any kind of bandwidth constraints. The problem with hardware firewalls is that they are pricey and they have bandwidth constraints. My data center provides NetScreen firewall, but the limit of traffic is 75mbps. I need those 100mbps! 75mbps is not an option for me.
I read some good reviews about Visnetic, Outpost and PortGate.
My questions to you are:
1. Do you think that a software firewall will be able to handle such a high amount of traffic? Bear in mind that I'm talking about Pentium 4 servers with at least 512 MB RAM and a 100 Mbit connection.
2. Which firewalls are known to be fast and stable under high bandwidth requirements?
Thanks in advance,
Helder
