Palo Alto PA-5060 is one fast firewall

帕洛阿尔托的新的防火墙提供的性能比时快10倍我们在2008年进行测试，并差点在防火墙-only模式的20Gbps的额定容量，根据我们独有的明智选择测试。

Of course, there is always a tradeoff betweensecurity和性能。在帕洛阿尔托的PA-5060的情况下，这一切都取决于哪些功能打开和关闭。

Palo Alto has shaken up the firewall market with its "application aware" feature, and we found that this next-generation capability carries no performance penalty. The PA-5060 does application-layer inspection by default.

On the other hand - and this is a pretty big caveat -UTMrates were nowhere near the device's stated 20Gbps limit. Performance was far lower with any UTM feature enabled than when the PA-5060 operated in firewall-only mode.

无论哪个UTM功能，我们启用 - 入侵防御，防间谍软件，防病毒软件，或者它们的任意组合 - 结果基本一样的，如果我们想打开只有一个这样的功能。简单地说，有没有额外的性能开销，超出速率初始锐减，进行叠加多种类型的流量检查。

Rates also fell when the device handled SSL traffic. And when decrypting SSL traffic, the system's four 10-gigabit Ethernet interfaces ran at rates that would make Fast Ethernet aficionados smile.

一些，这是可以预期的。所有的安全设备处理SSL流量的时候慢下来，我们已经看到大得多的下降，以百分比计算，使UTM功能时。

总体而言，我们会表征PA-5060是一个能干的表演。虽然它提供了许多独特的应用检测功能，它并不完全废除有关安全与性能的权衡长期存在的问题。

网络计量

Forwarding rate was the primary metric in our tests. We used both mixed and static HTTP loads to measure rates under various configurations, along with separate tests to assess performance for SSL traffic. We also verified the PA-5060's TCP connection capacity and connection setup rate.

The forwarding rate tests clearly show that the PA-5060, which can be equipped with up to four 10-Gbit/s interfaces, runs at least 10 times faster than earlier Palo Alto models.

In a test involving heavy Web traffic with a mix of content types and object sizes, the PA-5060 moved data at around 17Gbps when configured as a firewall.

That's a bit under the system's 20Gbps rated capacity, which isn't altogether surprising since such data-sheet numbers often are obtained using best-case conditions such as a single large object requested over and over.

In contrast, the traffic load we used involved a mix of text, images and binary content of various sizes - just the sort of Web traffic often seen on enterprise networks. The 17Gbps rate we saw in testing is probably a more meaningful predictor of performance on production networks.

这里提供的混合交通负荷是相同的一个有个足球雷竞技app网络世界Joel Snyder used in his 2008review of Palo Alto's PA-4020 firewall.In that test, the PA-4020 topped out at around 1.6Gbps (vs. of a rated capacity of 2.0 Gbps).

UTM的性能损失

与大多数其他安全设备,sh利率下降arply if various UTM functions - such as antispyware, antivirus, and intrusion prevention capabilities - are enabled. Again using the same mixed Web load, we saw rates drop from 17Gbps to around 5.3G or 5.4Gbps.

The good news is that rates held steady regardless of the number of UTM functions in use. So, it doesn't matter whether the PA-5060 does antispyware, antivirus, intrusion prevention, or any combination of these.

提高转发速率的一种方法是禁用serverresponse inspection, which checks traffic flowing from servers to clients. Disabling this feature caused rates to nearly triple, to 13.7Gbps. This setting is mainly useful when the firewall sits in front of data centers or other server farms. Enterprise network managers deploying firewalls to protect clients will want to keep server inspection enabled (which is the default setting).

Speed Bump: SSL Handling

SSL加密是计算密集型的。即使有专用芯片的任务时，PA-5060一样，几乎所有其他的高端防火墙，是一个慢得多表演处理时SSL流量。

The PA-5060 generally moved traffic at around 7.5G to 7.6Gbps in every test case. We initially suspected that the nearly identical rates were caused by some limit in our test gear. But back-to-back tests of the Spirent Avalanche equipment without the PA-5060 in line moved traffic at around 8.6Gbps, faster than the firewall. So the test gear wasn't the bottleneck. (见我们的测试方法.)

对于SSL流量率比那些明文流量较高，除了唯一的防火墙测试案例。这表明，PA-5060默认完成SSL流量较少的检查。帕洛阿尔托的工程师证实了这一点，但仅限于由思博伦雪崩产生的特定业务;在这种情况下，PA-5060简单地归交通类型“SSL”，并没有进一步的检查。帕洛阿尔托说，有在PA-5060可以检测隐藏在SSL流量某些攻击的情况下，但我们并没有试图验证这种说法。

The PA-5060 does support decryption of SSL traffic for deeper inspection, but that feature comes with a heavy performance cost. When doing SSL decryption, rates fell to 986Mbps when the PA-5060 acted as a firewall, and just 108Mbps with all UTM features enabled.

Both numbers are a long way off from the 17-Gbps rates we saw in the cleartext tests, or even the 7.5-Gbps rates in the SSL tests without decryption. If higher-speed decryption of SSL is required, network managers might consider a purpose-built appliance such as those from Netronome and other vendors.

Static Object Handling

流量负载的是混合对象大小提供什么样的企业Web流量可能看起来像一个近似，但它肯定不是适用于所有情况。我们也跟着跑固定物体的大小不同的测试：一是将10字节的对象，因为这是接近，如Web日志的许多研究观察到的平均对象大小，而另一个具有512k字节的对象，因为这种大尺寸将更好地描述最大防火墙率。

Of course, no production network carries Web traffic where every request is for 10- or 512-kbyte objects, but modeling some allegedly "real world" condition wasn't the goal here. The tests with static object sizes had a simpler goal: To describe the limits of firewall performance when handling average and large Web objects.

Not surprisingly, the PA-5060 turned in its single fastest result, nearly 18.7Gbps, in tests when configured as a firewall and presented with 512-kbyte objects. With average 10-kbyte objects, rates were a bit slower, around 16.3Gbps.

Enabling UTM features produced a similar result as with the mixed-object loads: Rates were substantially lower than in the firewall-only tests, but very consistent regardless of which combination of antispyware, antivirus and intrusion prevention we used. Here again, the PA-5060 moved large objects faster than average-sized objects after we'd enabled UTM features, though by a smaller margin than in the firewall-only tests. With UTM features turned on, the PA-5060 moved large objects only about 1Gbps faster (around 6.2G to 6.3Gbps) than average-size objects (around 5.2Gbps).

该PA-5060也于当静态对象的参与，特别是在大型物体的测试率较低移动SSL流量。这是预期的结果，因为更多的字节用于设备的加密引擎更多的工作。在大多数SSL测试案例，分别为10.5克左右到11Gbps，平均大小的物体和周围8.8Gbps与大对象。

Also, traffic rates for SSL were around the same regardless of which features we enabled or disabled on the firewall. As in the mixed-object tests, the PA-5060 didn't try any further inspection after classifying the Spirent traffic as SSL.

解密SSL流量进行了沉重的性能开销，甚至高于在混合对象的测试。启用S​​SL解密，利率跌至100Mbps的时候，我们提供大型物体的PA-5060。而且，我们所使用的RC4弱-MD5密码;如果有的话，利率可能会被仍然为AES256-SHA1更强的加密这样的降低。

TCP连接测试

虽然流量速率是表征防火墙性能无疑是有益的，但不是唯一的指标此事。我们还进行了单独测试，以确定PA-5060有多少并发连接可以处理，以及如何快速它可以建立和拆除这些连接。

In the TCP connection capacity tests, we configured Spirent Avalanche to build up successively larger connection counts by having each existing connection make one new HTTP request every 60 seconds. The largest number of concurrent connections the PA-5060 handled without errors was 3,620,979. While 3.6 million is a huge number, it's also less than the device's rated capacity of 4 million. After testing concluded, Palo Alto said it had identified a bug in the software version we tested, and that a release scheduled for release by press time would allow the firewall to handle 4 million concurrent connections. We did not test the new software.

在相关的测试中，我们还研究了在该防火墙将建立和拆除新建连接的最大速率。在这里，我们配置了Spirent雪崩使用HTTP 1.0版，迫使每个HTTP请求建立新的TCP连接。当处理此负荷时，PA-5060使用设备的10千兆以太网接口的所有四个处理时每秒无差错44120个连接。在涉及两个接口和Palo Alto的软件的早期版本的测试中，我们观察到每秒近47000连接无误差率。无论是率很高并很可能会为广大企业用户绰绰有余。

While there's room for improvement in the PA-5060's performance, especially when it comes to UTM performance and SSL decryption, we're encouraged by these results. The PA-5060 is already far faster than the PA-4020 tested earlier, and it's still one of the few firewalls with true application-layer inspection capabilities. With some optimizations to UTM and SSL performance, it may do away with security/performance tradeoffs once and for all.

Thanks

有个足球雷竞技app网络世界非常感谢思博伦通信，这提供了思博伦雪崩3100 GT交通电器为这个项目的援助。思博伦的米歇尔Rhines，杰夫·布朗格伦小科里和克里斯·查普曼还提供工程支持。

Newman is a member of the Network World Lab Alliance and president of Network Test, an independent test lab and engineering services consultancy. He can be reached atdnewman@networktest.com.