Check Point is not exactly happy with my appliance hardware list published on this blog.The reason is that they’d rather like to talk about SPU and throughput instead of CPU models, gigahertz and amount of RAM.Are they trying to keep important information away from us? No, I think that is not the case.

But they fear that only looking at partial hardware data can lead to false conclusions when it comes to sizing decissions.

A very good example are the recent comments to the appliance hardware list. As you can see, 21400 appliances and 12600 appliances have same CPU and RAM, but differ in performance. The reason is that the rest of the appliance is different and this leads to different benchmark values.

Please always have that in mind when do make sizing decissions based in my appliance hardware list!

There’s much more to a good security gateway hardware than CPU and RAM. Good HDD I/O, the right network interfaces and so many more componentsmakes the package complete.