Hardware Requirements

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This section provides information on hardware requirements for running NG Firewall.


Hardware Requirements

  • NG Firewall must be installed onto a dedicated machine with at least two NICs.
  • NG Firewall installs to the hard drive of a PC, erasing all data on that drive in the process. Please be aware of this before starting the installation.

Purchasing an NG Firewall Appliance

You can purchase a server directly from us, pre-installed with our software. Please see our appliances page for more information.

Using your own Hardware

One of the great things about NG Firewall is that we're software based, meaning you can install it to any desktop or server PC that fits the bill. When putting together an NG Firewall server you must account for several variables - the hardware you're installing onto, the number of users as well as the workload of those users. The table below provides some recommended hardware specs by network size.

Please remember that these are only guidelines: each network is different, each user is different, each configuration is different.

Hardware Recommendations Table

Resource Processor Memory Hard Drive Notes
minimum spec 1 core 2 GB 40 GB Platform only (no apps)
1-50 devices 2 cores 4 GB 40 GB Arista ETM z4 equivalent
51-150 devices 4 cores 8 GB 80 GB
151-500 devices 4 or more cores 16 GB 160 GB
501-1500 devices 4 or more cores 16 GB 250 GB Arista ETM z12 & Q12 equivalent
1501-5000 devices 6 or more cores 32 GB 500 GB Arista ETM z20 & Q20 equivalent

Hardware Compatibility

If you are using NG Firewall on your own hardware you will need to do the research to determine if the hardware is compatible. Generally speaking, if a particular piece of hardware is known to work well in recent versions of Linux then it has a good chance of working with NG Firewall.

To know for sure, you will need to order the equipment and install NGFW on it. If it works - it is compatible. If it does not work, you can try tweaking BIOS settings and possibly swapping parts and/or monitor and disk configurations. If it still does not work, the hardware is likely incompatible.

For users that do not want to go through this process, buying an appliance is suggested as that is the only hardware we can guarantee will work and the only hardware we support.

We do not suggest USB NICs. In our experience they perform poorly and are not reliable.