Gents and Ladies
Background: Replacing a commercial solution with Netgate (yes i know both commercial but…you know what i mean). Being upfront, its a PA-850. The primary reason is just to reduce cost. Subscriptions cost money and it’s not fully needed at this particular branch location. This location has 2x 1G internet circuits and a P2P (leased) connection to our colo which will be decommed in favor of IPsec.
So with the budget in hand, we are going to do a bakeoff with Netgate and Juniper.
Im thinking a 4100 would be fine for this as judging by the performance expectations on the netgate site exceeds the 850 just in throughput. I could go 5100 but thats just overkill, IMO.
Juniper will be a SRX380.
Throughput currently has one of our 1G circuits sitting around 400Mbps including being a Global Protect gateway. GP will be going away completely and instead, the endpoints will be Windows 365. The office will essentially be a WeWork situation where employees reserve desk space when they choose to come in otherwise they are remote.
My concern to be honest is the CPU and memory of the netgate appliance. 4GB seems paltry but really the CPU is a concern. There are no plans to run IDPS.
Any concern with the Atom chips? In my mind, it would struggle with the IPsec more than the routing out to the Internet. In fact, i would imagine the 6100 as well but i could be wrong.
Would the 1RU appliances be a better fit?