SG-5100 pfSense® Security Gateway Appliance

[Xentrk]

New product from Netgate. They are taking pre-orders. The SG-5100 pfSense® Security Gateway Appliance CPU is Quad Core Intel® Atom™ C3558 2.2 GHz, with AES-NI and Intel QuickAssist acceleration. The C3558 appears to be the CPU of choice in newer desktop network appliances manufactured by Lannar, Inc and Aaeon as well.

See the C3558 OpenSSL benchmark article for details. Looks like a nice piece of kit if you can afford it. Especially if OpenVPN performance is a high priority. Looking forward to getting OpenVPN performance numbers from users once deliveries start occurring.

 

[sfx2000]

Kudos to the pfSense team for getting some new hardware out on x86-64.

Netgate is pfSense these days - ADI, Lanner, Aeeon, along with others are the OEM/ODM's for pfSense branded HW under the Netgate/pfSense brand.

Just be advised - there's not a roadmap beyond pfSense 2.5 - the future there with that team is Linux and the new platform.

 

[Magebarf]

Kudos to the pfSense team for getting some new hardware out on x86-64.

Netgate is pfSense these days - ADI, Lanner, Aeeon, along with others are the OEM/ODM's for pfSense branded HW under the Netgate/pfSense brand.

Just be advised - there's not a roadmap beyond pfSense 2.5 - the future there with that team is Linux and the new platform.

It seems their intention is to have their new platform up and running on the SG-5100 as well, but so far it has not materialized other than as an Amazon instance.
Whether this platform will only consist of TNSR which they are starting with, or the "little brother" that has been mentioned earlier, SCLR, also seems a bit unclear.
I believe Netgate has quite a bit of decisions left to make regarding business model, pricing and feature/product packaging for their new platform(s).

Edit: I need to make a habit to double check on my sources before spreading the info...
On premise deployment is now available for customers of SG-5100, XG-1537, and XG-1541: https://www.netgate.com/press-releases/tnsr-now-available-on-netgate-appliances.html
Also another blog post on the topic: https://www.netgate.com/blog/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-premises.html

 

[Trip]

I was looking at the 5100 recently as a potential option for a small office. The merits are nice: no subscriptions, plenty of packages, fq_codel baked in, etc. Other enterprise vendors have much better device integration and centralized control of the whole security stack as a result (Sophos, etc.), but for those that don't want/need all that, or prefer to piece together their own suite, pfSense still represents a decent value as a discrete component.

 

[sfx2000]

@Trip - the ARM based SG-3100 is a great choice for remote offices...

I'm a bit biased towards Marvell - but the Netgate team did a decent job with that one - supporting the FreeBSD ports over to the current Marvell chips...

 

[Trip]

@sfx2000 - Yeah, I would presume excellent for pFsense instances running whatever packages in-software on WAN links of 300-400Mb/s or less, as that seems to be the point at which 1.5-2Ghz ARM chips max out. For the 5100 and its Atom C3558, this YouTube review seems to indicate Gb+ routing, I believe via CPU... which is quite a nice bump in speed, especially considering how cringe-worthy the word "Atom" used to be when it comes to performance in this role. It would be interesting to see where Marvell's latest offerings would slot into more firewall appliances on the price-to-performance curve...

 

[kvic]

Cosmetics perhaps is the least aspect people would care about such device. Personally I find SG-3100 simply ugly to sit on my desk. They're expensive too. If you search amazon for atom C3558, quality alternatives are available. I found the older C25xx series from Netgate more appealing and catered to a wider audience, specially SOHO users. The newer series looks like aiming high?

Netgate used to shine on me just like Apple does. But for example, I found this year's offering from Apple is so dull and I haven't got a new iPhone for years. The rising star is Nokia for me. I need something equivalent like the new Nokia in routers.

Interestingly when I checked out pfSense and OPNsense a while back. I found both have a company backing behind. It's Netgate in US behind pfSense. OPNsense gets an European company backing. So while users show great deal of love on each side and individual companies, beneath the surface it's simply business.