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Hardware recommendations for Home license - exaggerated?

Hi,

The thing is, I have been going through some of the threads here and elsewhere and it seems that if one really wants to use what Sophos UTM can offer, people recommend beefy hardware, nothing short of an Core i3 to run the system on. I wonder why this is. A quick check of Sophos' own offers indicates, an up to date Atom or BayTrail should do just fine. For example:

SG105 --> Intel Atom E3826 1.46GHz | 2GB RAM
SG135 --> Rangeley C2558 2.4GHz | 6GB RAM
SG210 --> Celeron 2.7GHz | 8GB RAM
SG 310 --> Core i3 3.5GHz | 12GB RAM

when I look at what throughput Sophos rates these babies at (including VPN, IPS, all >>100Mbit/s) I can't fathom how even a PowerUser at home would have the need to get beefier hardware to run this.
I didn't think I'd open a new thread since there is tons on home user hardware already but the fact that so many posts claim one needs an Intel core i3 processor to run the full feature-set of UTM buffles me a bit. Are Sophos' hardware appliances running on some different version, somehow way more optimized to the hardware, multi-threaded... while the home user edition is not?

I have been running an astaro and now Sophos UTM at home for four years now on an Atom Dualcore N450 with 2GB of RAM. Switching on all the gimmicks slows things down substantially ( WAN & LAN) for a DMZ/guest net and a Cloudserver but VLANs could do the trick too.
We constantly use IPsec and SSL VPN on our private laptops, phones and tablets. We might upgrade our provider bandwith to 100Mbit/s down and hopefully >10Mbit/s up at some point but I doubt it could get any faster anytime soon.

I'm happy for any tips and recommendations.

My current pick for a new setup (excluding SSD & 8GB RAM) would be:

Supermicro J1900 board (X10SBA) 2x Intel NIC 180€
Supermicro C2558 board (A1SRi-2558F ) 4x Intel NIC - 350€ (cheapest I could find with >2 NICs [:(]

would that not suffice?

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0 randfee over 5 years ago

thanks for the input guys. It still leaves me wondering what Sophos is thinking selling those boxes 'underpowered' then.

One big reason to favour the Atoms/Celerons is that I can actually find ITX boards with two or more NICs. I have a hard time finding any small boards with >=2 NICs that is more powerful than the Atoms. I wasn't planning on building a desktop (size-wise). Small and low on power-consumption is also one of my goals. hmm..
Well, a good compromise is what's mostly best.

BTW 90% of UTM is multithreaded but the IPS is not. Snort is single threaded so if you want to stuff that 100 megabit pipe with the core security foundation on(http proxy with dual a/v, applicaiton control, IPS, and ATP) you will at a minimum need the beefiest core I-3 you can get.

wouldn't this mean, that even a slower octa core would outperform an i3....
edit: ah, the new i3's at least have 4 threads (HT).
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0 William Warren over 5 years ago in reply to randfee

thanks for the input guys. It still leaves me wondering what Sophos is thinking selling those boxes 'underpowered' then.

One big reason to favour the Atoms/Celerons is that I can actually find ITX boards with two or more NICs. I have a hard time finding any small boards with >=2 NICs that is more powerful than the Atoms. I wasn't planning on building a desktop (size-wise). Small and low on power-consumption is also one of my goals. hmm..

wouldn't this mean, that even a slower octa core would outperform an i3....
edit: ah, the new i3's at least have 4 threads (HT).

the atoms aren't underpowerd for what they are able to do. In your situation they would most likely be underpowered. Considering there's almost zero power difference betweent he fastest atom and I-3 an i-3 makes better sense if you cna afford it AND want to make sure you have the headroom for the future with your network parameters.

Owner: Emmanuel Technology Consulting

http://etc-md.com

Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng,

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0 William Warren over 5 years ago in reply to randfee

thanks for the input guys. It still leaves me wondering what Sophos is thinking selling those boxes 'underpowered' then.

One big reason to favour the Atoms/Celerons is that I can actually find ITX boards with two or more NICs. I have a hard time finding any small boards with >=2 NICs that is more powerful than the Atoms. I wasn't planning on building a desktop (size-wise). Small and low on power-consumption is also one of my goals. hmm..

wouldn't this mean, that even a slower octa core would outperform an i3....
edit: ah, the new i3's at least have 4 threads (HT).

the atoms aren't underpowerd for what they are able to do. In your situation they would most likely be underpowered. Considering there's almost zero power difference betweent he fastest atom and I-3 an i-3 makes better sense if you cna afford it AND want to make sure you have the headroom for the future with your network parameters.

Owner: Emmanuel Technology Consulting

http://etc-md.com

Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng,

Other addons to follow
Cancel
Up 0 Down

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