Xena Safire Enterprise Firewall Testing Evaluation of Enterprise-Class Firewalls

Abstract

Security is an essential element of every network and the firewall is at the core of network security. Firewall architecture, platform and services configuration can impact both security and performance. Thus, to ensure delivering a superior user experience, it is necessary to benchmark firewalls to establish their performance limits. Xena Networks’ Safire Enterprise Firewall Tester has been designed to provide exactly this benchmarking capability.

Xena Networks commissioned Tolly evaluate the capabilities and ease-of-use of the Safire Enterprise Firewall Tester. This was accomplished by running a series of tests on a leading enterprise firewall deployed as a virtual appliance. Additionally, Tolly established the raw throughput limits of the Safire solution.

Tolly tests confirmed the need for benchmarking firewalls as the Safire tests showed dramatically different firewall throughput levels based on the security policy and functions performed by the firewall. Back-to-back tests between ports of the Safire confirmed 10Gbps of throughput. Finally, testers noted the simplicity with which a test could be configured and run with automatic analysis of the raw results.