What mix of applications/access methods you use is going to impact the processor & load on the box.

Given that this wasn’t a particularly expensive as an option (~990USD), I always included this as standard in most of my designs. Anecdotal – systems with this card seemed to have lower latency this was noticeable applications such as Citrix and Terminal Services. I’d never seen any hard and fast details on when this was necessary (it was installed as standard on the SA6500 and is included in the SM360).

The only real exception to this was that the old SA4500 had an optional “Cryptographic Module”, an SSL offload card.

Juniper have traditionally sold on the basis that each appliance can adequately cope with the maximum license user count (i.e.

The SM160 can be considered the equivalent to the old SA4500 chassis, whilst the SM360 can be considered the replacement for the SA6500.

To some extent the chassis is irrelevant – it provides a power bus and that’s about it – so I’ll focus on the cards themselves.Each card is rated at either 1,000 concurrent users or 10,000 concurrent users two cards can be fitted in a MAG6610, and four can be fitted in the MAG6611. The processing comes from the option cards deployed, either the SM160 or SM360 cards in the context of SSL VPN. The MAG 6610 Chassis contains no latent processing power, none that you can use anyway.

Whilst I have deployed about a dozen across the world, it’s still early days to definitively nail this down, but I’d thought I’d share what I can and provide some anecdotes as to what I’ve seen in the real world. I was asked a question by as to whether I’d see any real-world performance indications on the Juniper MAG 6610 Chassis.

Juniper mag4610