Cisco Cisco IPS 4520 Sensor Weißbuch
© 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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7.2. Maximum Concurrent Connections
The maximum number of concurrent connections is an especially important metric for data center deployments
and other application-heavy environments where the IPS must keep track of a very high number of transactions.
The longer connections are kept active by the applications on the network, the higher the importance of this
metric.
Table 10.
Maximum concurrent connections
IPS 4345
IPS 4360
IPS 4510
IPS 4520
Maximum Concurrent Connections
750,000
1,730,000
3,870,000
8,600,000
7.3. Maximum Connections per Second
A maximum number holds some value, but is incomplete when building a network. Throughput and connections
rarely occur in a slow, steady climb. For these reasons, the number of connections per second is important. If
“bursty” traffic connections occur naturally in the deployment environment, the maximum value may not really
matter, as the velocity of the growing connection rates will cause problems far before the theoretical maximum is
ever reached.
Table 11.
Maximum connections per second
IPS 4345
IPS 4360
IPS 4510
IPS 4520
Maximum Connections per Second
30,000
45,000
75,000
100,000
8. Conclusion
IPS performance metrics consist of several components, such as throughput, latency, and connection-related
metrics.
Most IPS vendors do not report all IPS performance metrics, or the methodology used to get these performance
metrics. Throughput numbers are often limited to either a pure network throughput number without any inspections
or a single traffic standard reported without any explanation of their methodology.
Cisco publishes two throughput metrics for the IPS 4300 and 4500 Series: maximum inspection throughput and
real-world average throughput. While the first metric establishes the maximum throughput that can be achieved
based completely on the inspection of HTTP traffic, the second metric is based on a broad mix of traffic, with
components representing different traffic mixes and deployments.
Cisco also describes our various testing methodologies, allowing customers to better choose the right IPS for their
network environment and traffic mix. While some vendors treat customer deployments as if they were liabilities
“outside the control” of the vendor, we see this as part of our partnership with our customers. Each individual real-
world component throughput result is available to your Cisco technical representative for proper sizing needs.
Cisco also publishes detailed results and methodology for latency and connection tests.
The Cisco IPS 4510 delivers a maximum inspection throughput of over 5 Gbps and a real-world average
inspection throughput of 3 Gbps. The Cisco IPS 4520 delivers a maximum inspection throughput of over 10 Gbps
and a corresponding real-world average of 5 Gbps.