Internet Edge and Defense in Depth

[jof at thejof.com (Jonathan Lassoff)]

I would argue that collapsing all of your policy evaluation and routing for
a size/zone/area/whatever into one box is actually somewhat detrimental to
stability (and consequently, security to a certain extent).

Cramming every little feature under the sun into one appliance makes for
great glossy brochures and Powerpoint decks, but I just don't think it's
practical.

Take a LAMP hosting operation for example. Which will scale the furthest to
handle the most amount of traffic and stateful sessions: iptables and snort
on each multi-core server, or one massive central box with some interface
hardware and Cavium Octeons.
If built properly, my money's on the distributed setup.

Cheers,
jof