Abstract

NetScreen Technologies commissioned The Tolly Group to benchmark the NetScreen-5200, a purpose-built high-performance Internet security system outfitted with Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and to compare the results with those of a similarly outfitted Cisco PIX 535 firewall/VPN and Nokia IP740 firewall device. The Tolly Group conducted application throughput and zero-loss throughput tests, as well as standard latency tests for both firewall and VPN tunnel configurations, the latter incurring the extra processing factored in with support for 3DES and SHA-1. Each of the devices was subjected to a range of session loads, escalating from 1,000 sessions to as many as 500,000 sessions in firewall tests.