Mike Hanley's Blog

Numbers Everyone Should Know from Google

I recently came a cross a Google presentation that had Numbers Everyone Should Know which I thought was very interesting:

L1 cache reference	0.5 ns
Branch mispredict	5 ns
L2 cache reference	7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock	25 ns
Main memory reference	100 ns
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy	3,000 ns
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network	20,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory	250,000 ns
Round trip within same datacenter	500,000 ns
Disk seek	10,000,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk	20,000,000 ns
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk	20,000,000 ns

Source: http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html

Cisco ASA 5500 Configuration Examples

I found a nice set of How-To links on configuring Cisco's ASA 5500 Series security appliance:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6120/prod_configuration_examples_list.html

Cisco Network Topology Icons and Visio Stencils

I came across several cool Visio shapes for Cisco's Network Topology icons used in their product documentation.

Network Topology Icons
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac50/ac47/2.html

Visio Stencils
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/prod_visio_icon_list.html

Cisco ASA 5505 Firewall Appliance

I have been a long time user of Microsoft's ISA Server starting back with ISA Server 2000 all the way up to 2006. I even used Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0 before ISA Server. I recently took a look at the new beta version of ISA--now rebranded as Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) and I not sure if I should switch to a hardware based firewall solution versus a software one.

I am in the processing of moving my servers to Windows Server 2008 and I don't want to wait until Forefront TMG is released. Unfortunately, ISA Server 2006 will not run on Windows Server 2008. I have been investigating simplifying my firewall setup using by using a smaller hardware device. I came across the Cisco ASA 5505 from a hosting provider we use at work (Vertigo.com). The Cisco ASA 5505 is very nice device. It is a bit tougher to setup than ISA Server, but it has a nice admin UI in addition to the traditional Cisco command line support.

Cisco ASDM 6.1

So far, I am still doing research, but the idea of a hardware firewall running Cisco IOS is very appealing.