Monday, August 24, 2015

High End Check Point appliances, digging further

In my previous post I have asked you about origin of Check Point 61K and 41K chassis. Before continuing this discussion please let me explain why I am digging into this.

The main reason is that Check Point does not provide enough information about the hardware specs of the appliances. Customers apparently should be happy just with security power indicator. Basically Check Point tells us: trust our sizing tool, we will present you with the right box for your throughput and particular combination of your security features.

This does not work 100%, there are always issues with border customer cases, wrongly assessed requirements and missed functionality.

Treating appliances as black boxes does not help to built the trust. How do we know if the box is powerful as announced? With high-end boxes there are even more bottleneck that with regular appliances. Thus more questions.

The second reason is about my personal preferences. As an engineer I like taking things apart to see what is inside. Design and capabilities: these are the points I want to be sure about.

If you seem this too much, it is okay, you can stop reading here and get back to your own toys. If you are with me, I want to share some of the findings.

------- read below this line if you are still interested -------

In the comments of the previous post someone has put a link to ASIS, a company with less than 200 employees, according to its LinkedIn profile. The company has two addresses in Israel and USA. US address apparently belongs to a small sales office.

According to my anonymous reader,  this company is producing the chassis for Check Point. Indeed, their Perform 140 and Perform 60 chassis look very similar to 61K and 41K, without SSM and SGM blades.


Now, what about the blades?

I did not find anything that would look like SGM or SSM on Asis web site.

So far I am assuming Check Point is using Advantech MIC-5333 or MIC-5332 ATCA modules as SGM blades.



Unfortunately, I did not found the Switch modules (SSM) on Advantech site. Advantech only lists a single Switch Module for ATCA, ATCA-9112, which looks a bit different than the switch blades used on 61K or 41K.

Strangely, on marketing photos of Advantech ATCAs that I have already cited in the previous post, switch modules look exactly as Check Point ones, except for the colour, although it is listed as ATCA-9112. Could be that these marketing photos were done with older modification of the blade. So far I continue searching for the definitive proof.

If you have any further information to share, please do so. On my side, I will keep you posted about news for the matter.




2 comments:

  1. Valeri, much appreciated for your interest in this, great to see someone digging into this! Keep us posted!

    ReplyDelete