Abstract

One-page summary of the full test report.

NetScreen Technologies, Inc. commissioned The Tolly Group to benchmark the NetScreen-500 against the Cisco PIX 535 firewall outfitted with an optional VPN Accelerator Card. The Tolly Group conducted application throughput and zero-loss throughput tests, as well as standard latency tests for both firewall and VPN tunnel configurations under various session loads.

The NetScreen 500 delivered 750 Mbps of my directional firewall throughput, even with 25,000 active sessions and a 0.001% packet loss threshold versus just 2 Mbps for a Cisco PIX 535 with 1000 sessions.

The NetScreen 500 achieved 110% more by directional throughput then Cisco PIX 535 with 1400-byte packets and pumps 59% more data with 512-byte frames over a VPN tunnel with 3DES and SHA-1.

The NetScreen 500 processed more than 126 Mbps of zero-loss by directional throughput with 1518 byte frames over a VPN tunnel employing 3DES and SHA-1, while Cisco PIX 535 discards large frames due to a lack of fragmentation support.

The NetScreen 500 delivered up to 49% lower firewall latency and up to 54% lower latency over VPN tunnels than the Cisco PIX 535.