I’m planning on upgrading my home internet connection to either 10Gbit or 25Gbit.
I would like to make a custom built router/firewall.
Does anyone have a running setup/hardware list that can provide a stable throughput of ~25Gbit between red and green.
Hello Flo,
we have our own line of appliances which are great for an Enterprise use case and can go up to 100 GBit/s of throughput:
There is of course the IPFire Enterprise Appliance which has two 10 GBit/s Ethernet Adapters built in:
And we have an even beefier model which we don’t have in the shop which comes with four 25 GBit/s Ethernet Controllers.
Product-Data-Sheet-IPFIRE-ULTIMATE-EU-R1.pdf (129.7 KB)
However, since these are enterprise-grade appliances, they might be slightly over your budget for a home internet connection.
At that rate, and if you want to be able to filter all that traffic properly, you will be looking at something with a large Intel Xeon processor with a lot of cores so that they can balance the load and some NICs that are able to feed all that data into the CPUs.
Thank you for your input. You guessed absolutely right that those appliances are a bit over the budget for my home setup.
The router/firewall I want to build will be often just idling at low throughput but should be able to handle the peak of 25Gbit (mainly large downloads/uploads, not many different connections).
Do you have more insight which hardware is to be preferred for such a setup?
It’s obvious for me that I have to pick a mainboard/chipset and cpu that provide enough CPU PCIE lanes for the NIC.
But do we have more experience in this comunity which hardware works best?
E.g.
Which mainboard/cpu combinations work best together or how many cpu cores for such a high throughput.
How important is single core performance vs number of cores?
Is there a reason to go specifically for Intel Xeon CPUs or Intel Core CPUs or AMD?