For years we have been building low cost enterprise grade firewalls for our small business clients using the Neoware CA10 or CA22 thin client running Pfsense (pictured left). Either of these devices can be outfitted with a 1U Right Angle PCI Riser, Multiple NIC Network Adapter and a DOM (disk on module) Hard Drive for under $100 USD. While this setup has been working well for many years, with the advent of gigabit internet and the high demands of computing nowadays, these machines are starting to reach their limits of usability. Don’t get me wrong, these machines will handle almost anything you throw at them and for most home or small business users this setup will more than suffice, however when you need certain enterprise features such as VPN Connectivity for 100’s of users, this guy starts to fall short due to its hardware limitations. If you are interested in building your own Neoware firewall, there is a nice how to here. As I said above, this has been our goto solution for small and medium sized businesses for years, however the time has come to build a new solution that can handle the demands needed of an enterprise grade device today. So the search began and we set out to find a device that would meet the following minimum requirements:

Must support x64 OS

Low Power Consumption

2 or more processor cores

Needs 1 x full height PCI-e slot

Supports at least 8GB DDR3 memory

1 x SATA port for Hard Drive or SSD.