It took a while and a call to Dell, but I got the new Sonicwall NSA 3600 registered and the licenses transferred. With all the firewall services running, it was time to take another look at performance. The news is surprisingly good.
One desktop can easily use all the download capacity, if multiple operations are supported by the server:
During heavy usage, the firewall CPU load is much less than I thought it would be based on my experience with the 250M:
Of course, all the download capacity in the world won’t help you if the bottleneck is on the other end:
It looks like I overbought when I got the 3600. I guess that’s better than underbuying, which is what I did with the 250M. The performance differences between the two seem to be greater than the specs would indicate.
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