It feels a little lightweight for the cost. I am not a hardware geek, but I struggle to see what this gets me over a mini ITX board running an Dual Core atom w/ a dual port Gigabit NIC running pfSense besides (what I assume is) a lower power draw.
I also worry with all the packets going through the core processor and it only being an 800mhz PPC. Is this going to be able to handle the traffic from a 100mbit connection w/ a protocol like bit torrent creating 100s of connections and it having to NAT that traffic.
The major issues I see with Home routers is either complexity or performance. Even here in Australia there exist a reasonable number of people who are able to get 100mbits services on HFC / Fibre. If you were able to include an FGPA that you could offload packet routing to you might have something interesting (can affordable FPGAs do gigabit packet rates?). Obviously an ASIC requires a fairly high production rate to be economical. Maybe a dual processor configuration with a dedicated packet passing processor and an "Application Processor".
I want to like this being its from my home city (Brisbane, Australia), but I really can't see the value in it over other devices.
If you think a dual core D525 is the sh*t, just wait until you see an 8 core OOE 'Atom' with AES-NI support, and 4 i350 GigE Ethernets running pfSense 2.2 (based on FreeBSD 10, so multi-core pf, etc...)
PFSense has been absolutely amazing for us, with us running 2 boxes to provide routing for inter office links. We looked at it for our core routers about 1 1/2 years ago, and would have gone with it except for it not at that time supporting our hardware in the stable release (ended up with Linux / IPtables / Keepalived due to time constraints). But our testbed (old PowerEdge R200 single dual core proc) handled everything we through at it. Certainly cheeper then the Juniper quote we got...
I am really impressed with the upcoming generation of atoms. They seem like they are going to be impressive in both networking and storage.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] threadI didnt really look at the components or r&d involved. Is it that much better than a tomato/dd-wrt based router?
I also worry with all the packets going through the core processor and it only being an 800mhz PPC. Is this going to be able to handle the traffic from a 100mbit connection w/ a protocol like bit torrent creating 100s of connections and it having to NAT that traffic.
The major issues I see with Home routers is either complexity or performance. Even here in Australia there exist a reasonable number of people who are able to get 100mbits services on HFC / Fibre. If you were able to include an FGPA that you could offload packet routing to you might have something interesting (can affordable FPGAs do gigabit packet rates?). Obviously an ASIC requires a fairly high production rate to be economical. Maybe a dual processor configuration with a dedicated packet passing processor and an "Application Processor".
I want to like this being its from my home city (Brisbane, Australia), but I really can't see the value in it over other devices.
If you think a dual core D525 is the sh*t, just wait until you see an 8 core OOE 'Atom' with AES-NI support, and 4 i350 GigE Ethernets running pfSense 2.2 (based on FreeBSD 10, so multi-core pf, etc...)
Or the dual core 4 x i350 variant for under $200.
yes, very low power.
PFSense has been absolutely amazing for us, with us running 2 boxes to provide routing for inter office links. We looked at it for our core routers about 1 1/2 years ago, and would have gone with it except for it not at that time supporting our hardware in the stable release (ended up with Linux / IPtables / Keepalived due to time constraints). But our testbed (old PowerEdge R200 single dual core proc) handled everything we through at it. Certainly cheeper then the Juniper quote we got...
I am really impressed with the upcoming generation of atoms. They seem like they are going to be impressive in both networking and storage.