Affordable and best Firewall to manager 50 - 100 servers

Hi,

Can you recommend affordable and best firewall to manage 50 -100 servers?.

Thanks in advance
Samson

[mdf]

How about a *BSD box that runs as firewall?

Looking for a HardWare firewall to place after our Core Router.

Forget the number of servers, the "firewalled" bandwidth is an issue here.
If you like Cisco, you can go ahead with their Cisco PIX firewall (be awared, you can make your own Cisco PIX firewall from an old Intel BX440 motherboard + flash memory, but this is another story)...

A lot of vendors offer firewalls, based on a simple PC with Linux / FreeBSD, that is a fact.

You will need a real hardware / embedded solution for high traffic - above 70Mbps.

[mdf]

You might want to take a look at the Juniper Netscreen series.

If you would like to plan for growth/scalability and have flexibilty as well you might want to consider the Checkpoint product line. This firewall can protect you all the way up to the application layer and is way more sophisticated than a port based firewall like Cisco PIX. The only firewall in a comparable class is Netscreen.

Hope this helps...

Netscreen, hands down. I have Cisco, Checkpoint and Netscreens here to compare.

-Roger

[hostmedic]

We, depending on location, use Netscreen or Checkpoint.

We have a Cisco Pix 501 sitting - its just that good - (enter sarcasicm here)

:-)

Anyone know of a good tutorial to make a linux based firewall server for a hundred megs of traffic?

The last firewall we used slowed down our ping time about 50%, we need something that will not slow down the connection.'

Thanks,

[mdf]

You might wat te take a look at ipfw running on freebsd.