Hey - you do know that unless you have like a 1 gigabit WAN connection, an Atom D510 or D525 is going to work fiine right?
Absolutely! a 1Gbps WAN is not gonna happen soon, especially here in Canada... Unless you pay $6,500 a month
I realize that I forgot to mention: I intend to do snort on LAN side as well as WAN. Unless I am mistaken, then a dual core CPU at 2.0GHz + will be strongly advised..
I dont know for sure if Celeron's take 16GB RAM... I surely hope so, and wouldnt be surprised if they did.
Right now I am leaning toward totally different architectures:
Embedded D525 with 8GB RAM (Supermicro X7SPE-HF-D525 or similar)
Embedded Celeron platform with 16GB RAM (GIGABYTE GA-C1007UN-D or GA-C1037UN-D) None have dual INTEL NIC's!! Is that big of a deal?? My current D510 platform uses dual Realtek and I never had problems with them...
Standard platform with Pentium G3220 or i3 or similar low end desktop chip and corresponding mobo.
Each solution has its own pros/cons. The embedded D525 will suffice plenty for the foreseeable future on the WAN side of things, but will most likely bottleneck on Snort/HAVP/Squid transactions for WAN, LAN1 & LAN2 (the DMZ). Also, it supports "only" 8GB RAM (officially 4GB). Should be plenty but currently I am maxing out 4GB so how much more will I use? If I end up at 150% of now, then I will be reaching the 8GB.. The D525 will allow rackmount in a 1U case easily, and is very low power.
The embedded celeron will, I think at least, offer similar or slightly better performance than the D525 but its bigger advantage is the bigger memory support. Other than that, it will generate more heat and require active cooling (or an oversized heatsink) and none of the embedded celeron platforms have Intel Nics...
Finally, the so-called standard platform will allow to customize everything (have dual Intel Nics, and some PCIE slots for additional Gigabit adapters, support 16GB + RAM and a fast dual core (although low end) CPU. The only downside is the noise and power consumption. Also, I am not sure I could fit such build in a 1U case...
Unbelievable, I succeeded in confusing myself....