topic Re: ECC memory on 6600? in Firewall and Security Management

ECC memory on 6600?

Thor — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:54:57 GMT

Hi,

Looking into upgrading from OpenServer to appliance boxes and from what I can gather the 6500s don't have a Xeon CPU and ECC memory while the 6800s do but they are a bit overkill for our use I think. I have a hard time finding info on other appliances though. I don't like the idea of running critical infrastructure on less than server grade hardware so is there any info on this somewhere? Or could someone running eg a 6600 tell me whether it has a Xeon CPU and ECC memory?

Regards,

Thor

Re: ECC memory on 6600?

PhoneBoy — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 06:35:09 GMT

In general, we don’t tend to publish detailed specs on the hardware in our appliances.
That said, our appliances typically have a MTBF that goes beyond their support life:
https://supportcenter.checkpoint.com/supportcenter/portal?eventSubmit_doGoviewsolutiondetails=&solutionid=sk115992
Yes, this doesn’t include the 6000 series appliances, but it gives you an idea.
Your local Check Point office may be able to answer your question more specifically.

Re: ECC memory on 6600?

Maarten_Sjouw — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 06:41:12 GMT

And now it even includes the 6000 series as well.

I know for a fact that the older 12000 series appliances use ECC memory, I don't know about the latest appliances yet but also the 15000 has ECC memory.

Re: ECC memory on 6600?

Thor — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 12:16:59 GMT

Thanks for replying. I'm not all that worried about component failure as I would expect a component failure will lead to the appliance shutting down and the cluster software should be able to handle that. I'm more worried about in-memory data corruption over time which may cause stability issues. Non-ECC memory have no way of detecting (or correcting) those type of errors as far as I'm aware and they are not related to component failure as they are a "feature" of non-ECC memory.