[Soekris] Mistletoe Tech

[Jason Dixon]

On Aug 26, 2006, at 1:41 PM, Justin Thomas wrote:

> The power of advertising.
>
> Regardless, from that same advertising material:
>
> "For its first generation, Mistletoe developed a series of  
> processors aimed
> at virtual private network creation and "firewall on a chip,"  
> ranging in
> speed from 200 Mbits/second to 4 Gbits/s. In a new generation  
> sampling this
> summer, Mistletoe added more unified-threat-management capabilities,
> offering the same speed grades in versions with and without bulk  
> encryption.
> A variety of products outside the strict security domain are planned,
> including SoC devices for load balancing, voice-over-Internet Protocol
> gateways, Web filtering and policy engines for both network access  
> control
> and general-purpose multilayer policy enforcement."
>
> Sounds like it offloads the processing of firewall and VPN type  
> network
> traffic on to a dedicated piece of silicon.  I'm very interested in
> technology that makes the handling of network security type operations
> simpler.
>
> It seems to me like something worthy of my initial question.

It seems worthy of an email to their sales department.  Since you  
don't know what the form factor is (or any of the specs), I can't  
imagine that anyone on the list would know whether it would be  
appropriate for use in a Soekris.

Personally, I'm a little wary of the hype.  What's the point of  
embedding a "system on a chip", if the chip still has to be installed  
in *something*?  Presumably, something that has its own series of  
hardware and software components.  Why would you want to put a 2nd  
"system" within your primary system, when the primary system is  
already capable of the same feature set?

--
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net