Cobia Community Blog

The game is changing for appliance users too - preaching to the Cobia choir

Eric Ogren has a good article up on his ComputerWorld blog about recent advances by Intel/AMD that make it "increasingly harder to justify large engineering investments in custom-built ASICs or hardware that is not built on a standard platform."  Amen brother!  This is exactly what we have been saying with Cobia from the beginning.  Todays multi-core processors with virtualization technologies offer exponentially greater computing power than have ever been available before from off the shelf products.  To the point that justifying custom silicon hardware in most cases does not make sense.  The good news is that following Moore's Law, this advantage is only going to continue to grow.  Yesterdays dual core lead to todays quad core, who knows what tomorrow.

A couple of points of fact bring home the reality of this for me.  First is the results I have seen with deep packet inspection on these new systems with optimized software.  Though up to this point (as a comment points on Erics article points out) we have only seen sub-Gbps speeds, I have good reason to beleive that this barrier will be passed like the sound barrier in airplanes long ago.  Supersonic deep packet inspection on off the shelf hardware will be a reality in the market within a few months!  The second point of fact is a conversation I had with a security director at a large media company in NY.  He told me that just 2 months he visited a data center his company has over in NJ. The place was cavernous and mostly empty.  He returned just two months later and the center was filled to the brim with Dell servers and they are looking to build another data center.  But they are also mandating to move any and every application possible onto virtual servers.

I am not the first blogger to say that virtualization will revolutionize the data center.  But between virtualization and these powerful new processors, there is a revolution going on.  Check out Cobia and see the performance that these trends are putting in your hands without expensive silicon.  We are just at the dawn of the brave new world, but it promises to continue the computer revolution to empower us to do more for less!

Multi-core benefits the security industry and more

Carl Weinschenk posted an article today on ITBusiness Edge in the Network Sentry blog about how the security industry is benefiting from the multi-core architectures now available.  Carl highlights what Check Point is doing with VPN-1 and what American Portwell Technology is doing with security appliances based on dual core technology. Finally, Mindspeed Technologies recent announcement too.  The bottom line here is that with multiple cores available many processor intensive applications are able to run on off the shelf components at a fraction of what customized silicon cost.

This has application beyond security.  I know our own lab stuff has shown how Cobia can take off with multi-core technology.  When you start thinking of virtualization, multi-function and the like, multi-core processors really take it to the next level.  Our security R&D team has some amazing stuff they are playing with that takes advantage of this and I hope to be able to share that with you soon.

The question in my mind is, what does this mean for the custom silicon crowd? With this kind of horsepower available and the onward and upward march of Moore's Law, why invest in custom silicon except for the absolutely most demanding and rewarding applications.  Any appliance vendors who are not looking at running off the shelf hardware, have to be taking a long hard look and wondering why not.  Any customers who are still paying premiums for custom burned silicon that is not even upgradeable have to look at this as well.