I just looked at the hardware comparatives between the UTM and SG series of appliances. In my environment the SG210 is functionally equivalent to the UTM 220 (meaning it's powerful enough). 8GB RAM vs 2GB in my UTM220. Even with the unauthorized 4GB upgrade to the 220 (yes, it will void your warranty) that's still double the RAM.
Seriously? I also asked my reseller for current subscription pricing for both. Won't say what my prices were but the SG210 Network Protection and Web Protection subscriptions were half what they wanted for my 220. And for the price of a single 220 Web Protection license, I'm only a few hundred short of a refresh into a pair of 210's w/ updated licenses. [:S]
we know, that the lower end sg x10 and x30 appliances outperform their todays UTM *** equivalents. But if you are a "older" UTM / Astaro customer, you may remember those discussions all 1-2 major updates, when customer appliances was tightly sized, and got slow with new versions due low resources.
the todays sizing guide should give you enough spare resources to definately also run blazing fast the upcoming 9.3 and also should be able to run staisfying a v10, SG x, NGFW however the UTM successor will be called then when once released next year, if you want to switch then to that one.
So a "oh, that new, fast hardware allows a downsizing" thinking may bring you in 1-2 years in that same performance trouble again, which may lead to another hardware upgrade then.
my recommendation...size well, and if budget allows it, even little over your expected resource and infrastructure growth. Costs little more $$, but will finally keep your users happy.
/Sascha
Wer Schreibfehler findet, darf sie behalten. Wenn ich via IPad poste, sind Verschreiber und grammatikalische Aussetzer irgendwie an der Tagesordnung.
Would buy the appliance sized for our needs, running current release just fine. Six months later a new UTM version came out with features we could take advantage of, followed six months later by new hardware sized correctly for the new UTM release. So then I spend two years running on an undersized appliance till the next cycle.
Looking at the current spec sheet, I think a SG210 would be enough for our needs for at least 9.3 and probably v10, assuming the demands on the appliance grow at the same rate they have the last few major releases.
The new hardware has new features that offload some of the more intensive tasks to specialty sections of the CPU which greatly enhances performance. To give an example. I have a client that had a Lynnfield I-7 quad core HT machine with 8 gigs of ram for his network of 50 machines one mail server and a webserver serving 4 different domain websites. This machine rarely went above a load factor of 1 our of 8....even during nightly log rotation and database runs.
We recently installed a SG210. This is a dual core Celeron Haswell with 8 gigs of ram. The statistics are nearly the same..maybe just a bit lower. The SG210 shouldn't have any issues with v10...that's just a guess but i'm judging by the resource usage of previous versions. Right now the new Haswell cores are blazing fast in UTM. It will be interesting to see what he new 1xx series of appliances is capable of...[:)]
