[Soekris] soekris / bandwidth ? heavy bandwidth traffic

[John P. Looney]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 10:18:20PM +0200, EC mentioned:
> I need few routers/fw for a production Internet service. I expect rather heavy
> bandwidth traffic (downloads) 50-100Mbs on each port (will use two ports per
> box probably).
> 
> Can a soekris box (ex 4801) be a good choice (Linux/OpenBSD) ? (As you may
> understand? it is actually a financial question.. is soekris good enough for
> this task or should I buy 1U/2U that are probably ~4x more expensive :( ).

 I don't think it will. Even beefier PIII based boxes can have trouble
with that much traffic, if you get a lot of small packets. Have a look at
Nexcom's boxes; this compares two of them;

    http://www.ipc2u.de/servlet/comp?22785&22752&22780

 I think I got mine from NexcomUK.co.uk in the end, as they were cheaper
than Nexcom. I've not done much with it, but it does have an internal
66/64bit PCI bus for the gigabit nics. Under a thousand euro for the 12
port version (without RAM/CPU).

John