NETGEAR FVX538NA manual Performance Management, Bandwidth Capacity

Chapter 6

Router and Network Management

This chapter describes how to use the network management features of your ProSafe VPN Firewall 200. These features can be found by clicking on the appropriate heading in the Main Menu of the browser interface.

The ProSafe VPN Firewall 200 offers many tools for managing the network traffic to optimize its performance. You can also control administrator access, be alerted to important events requiring prompt action, monitor the firewall status, perform diagnostics, and manage the firewall configuration file.

Performance Management

Performance management consists of controlling the traffic through the VPN firewall so that the necessary traffic gets through when there is a bottleneck and either reducing unnecessary traffic or rescheduling some traffic to low-peak times to prevent bottlenecks from occurring in the first place. The VPN firewall has the necessary features and tools to help the network manager accomplish these goals.

Bandwidth Capacity

The maximum bandwidth capacity of the VPN firewall in each direction is as follows:

•LAN side: 1,800 Mbps (eight LAN ports at 100 Mbps each, plus one Gigabit LAN port)

•WAN side: 200 Mbps (load balancing mode, two WAN ports at 100 Mbps each) or 100 Mbps (rollover mode, one active WAN port at 100 Mbps)

In practice, the WAN side bandwidth capacity will be much lower when DSL or cable modems are used to connect to the Internet. At 1.5 Mbps, the WAN ports will support the following traffic rates:

•Load balancing mode: 3 Mbps (two WAN ports at 1.5 Mbps each)

•Rollover mode: 1.5 Mbps (one active WAN port at 1.5 Mbps)

As a result and depending on the traffic being carried, the WAN side of the firewall will be the limiting factor to throughput for most installations.

Router and Network Management 6-1

v1.0, August 2006