New User questions

[rwitham]

First, my apologies to all as I am sure my questions have been answered a thousand times in these forums. I did do some searching, and will continue to do so, but I thought that perhaps some kind soul would already have faced these same questions and could share their experiences with me.

I work for State of Maine government as a security analyst, and I am very interested in doing some form of web content reporting and blocking at some point. I'm sure that all of you are accutely aware of the money problems that every state is facing, and we are no different. Untangle is extremely attractive if it has the performance and throughput we need.

We have 13,000 users, but only about 1,000-1,500 are online and active at any given time. Still, this number amounts to 3,000-5,000 connections with 10,000-20,000 threads peak.

I guess the biggest question is should we even consider Untangle, or are we well beyond the capabilities of the product. We have looked at commercial options, such as BlueCoat, but that is getting into the $100K+ range by the time we get all the bells and whistles, not to mention the ongoing annual maintenance.

So, is anyone running Untangle in a large enterprise operation like ours? What sort of lag times are encountered when doing filtering?
Any other words of encouragement would also be appreciated.

Thanks for your help.

Bob Witham, Information Systems Security Analyst
State of Maine, Office of Information Technology

[fasttech]

All those folks are running down one pipe? Or, are they spread across the state with their own connections.

What I mean is, you could build as many UT appliances as you wish and distribute them as appropriate to spread the load.

You can also daisy chain appliances as well if you have one pipe, using each appliance for a specific module.

[rwitham]

Yes, we all run down 1 pipe. We are planning on splitting the line at some point in future. The daisy-chain idea sounds like a plan as well. Thanks for the ideas.