Dear Michael,
That's a fair question. The short answer is additional capacity.
The long answer is that this firm was all set to add a second scanning
facility in Delaware, to scan credit card & loan apps; plus a second
"keystroke branch" in Mexico. This was already on the board for November; but
was postponed 6-12 months because of the dropoff in business from 9-11. In
addition, they want to tie their offices together with a VPN, which means even
more capacity. In other words, the T-1 circuits are just enough to get them
out of the hole of couriering DVD's daily to Manila.
Because of this, the T-1 circuits will probably grow into either multiple
aggregated T-1 lines or a fractional OC-3 line, depending on local loop costs
at the various locations. In NJ, Verizon charges $200/month for a T-1 frame
relay loop; but $6000 per month for an OC-3 ATM loop, even if you only use 1
fraction of the OC-3. [I don't have the costs yet for Mexico & The
Phillippines.]
So, as you see, I'll be building 2 to 4 identical appliances, with me
configuring & testing them all here, and shipping the remote units overseas. I
don't want to build these appliances next week, only to tell the customer he
needs new units in 6 months. Hence, that's the reason why I'm looking at dual
Athlon's or Xeon's with the v2.4x kernel: The very LAST place I need a
bottleneck is the VPN appliance! :)
-----
Speaking of which, are there any rough estimates of LEAF's capacity vs CPU
horsepower. Also, does the linux kernel take advantage of the "Screaming
Sindy" P4 instruction extensions?
Cheers!
Dan
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael D. Schleif
>Subject: Re: [Leaf-user] Starting from scratch to build a high capacity
>VPN tunnel appliance, part 2
>
>
>
>Dan Schwartz wrote:
>>
[cut]
>>
>> [By the way, you're probably wondering why they would need a dual
CPU
>> encryption appliance: The firm is a service bureau, scanning in over
100,000
>> documents per day - About 5 gigabytes per day. Then, they send the image
files
>> to Manila, where a crew of 200 operators key in and verify the data (sort
of a
>> "manual OCR"), then FTP the text back to NJ where it's put on disk or tape
for
>> the customer. Right now, they're sending a DVD every day via DHL to Manila
>> with the scans: It's actually slightly cheaper than a T-1; but they lose a
>> day. Basically, with T-1 lines on both ends (they are 4 miles from the
>> Pennsauken peering point) the 1.544 megabit line will be fully loaded for
11
>> hours just transmitting the data. Where the encryption (VPN circuit) comes
in
>> is that some of the customers are financial institutions, and it's a
selling
>> point in the highly competitive business.]
>
>[ snip ]
>
>What am I missing? How is that you think that you can saturate a single
>500 MHz celeron with an encrypted 1.5 Mbps connection?
>
>Unless I'm missing something, you might do well to redo that math . . .
>
>--
>
>Best Regards,
>
>mds
>mds resource
>888.250.3987
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