Hardware recommendation for firewalls (more than 4 NICs)

[Martín Coco]

Hi misc,

I'm currently looking for hardware alternatives for firewalls that 
should have more than four NICs.

Currently we are buying R200s from Dell, but we have the 4 NIC 
limitation. We could tell Dell to install a quad port NIC (in addition 
to the two-port onboard card), but I haven't read good things about the 
way they work.

I've also looked into soekris, but they don't seem to have enough CPU 
for what we want (this is pure speculation) as we also have intense 
IPSec traffic on some of these firewalls (I've seen that some of them 
could have encryption boards added to increase performance, but I don't 
know if it works for any kind of protocol, or at what rate).

In any case, what I would like to have is firewalls with multiple NICs 
(at least 6 NICs) *and* sufficient CPU to let IPSec work alright at 
least at ~50Mbps (internal backbone firewalls). The multiple NICs are to 
use trunk, pfsync, real network interfaces, etc.

Thanks,
Martmn.