Netgate SG-2100: Firewall with Gigabit Ports and pfSense System

Netgate is a company that markets specific firewall-oriented devices with the pfSense operating system. Within the range of equipment that it sells, we can find cheap firewalls oriented to domestic environments, and also high-end firewalls with Intel Xeon processors that are oriented to medium and large companies. Today they launched the new Netgate SG-2100 , a great value for money firewall ideal for home and small and medium office environments.

Key Features of the Netgate SG-2100 Firewall with pfSense

The main characteristics of this new firewall is the incorporation of a dual-core Marvell Armada 3720 (88F3720) processor at a speed of 1.2GHz , a very important feature of this SoC is that it incorporates FPU and also NEON SIMD. The RAM of this device is 4GB of DDR4 RAM , the downside is that you cannot expand this RAM capacity. As for the internal storage we have, we have 8GB eMMC on the board , although we could install an M.2 SATA 2242 SSD with 32GB of storage for the operating system, the M.2 is SATA and not NVMe.

Netgate SG-2100

Regarding connectivity, we have a Gigabit Ethernet port for the WAN that is combo , it is RJ-45 and also SFP, therefore, we can choose one port or another. Regarding the LAN , we have a Marvel 88E6141 switch with four Gigabit Ethernet ports , although the uplink speed is 2.5Gbps , therefore, if we are using the four ports to the maximum we will have a bottleneck. Any of the LAN ports can be used as an additional Internet WAN.

Other characteristics of this new firmware is that we can install an M.2 device, either an SSD or an LTE device, in addition, we also have a miniPCIe port to install Wi-Fi, and it has a slot for micro SIM cards. Finally, we have a miniUSB port for the console (the built-in cable comes), and a USB 2.0 port for administration issues and equipment logs.

Physically, this firewall is not rackable, so it is ideal to place it on a table or in a closet, it has an elegant and compact design, it has low power consumption and the operation is totally silent, since it does not need to have active cooling (no fan).

The built-in operating system is pfSense, Netgate benchmarks show interesting results, it runs at speeds of 1.56Gbps for routing, 881Mbps as a firewall, and is capable of providing up to 118Mbps in IPsec VPN. This team is situated halfway between the SG-1100 and the SG-3100 that we have previously seen in this article. With the 4GB of RAM we can run an IDS / IPS like Snort or Suricata, we can also install services that consume a large amount of ram like pfblockerNG and many others that we can install through the pfSense package manager.

We recommend you access the official website of the Netgate SG-2100 where you will find all the technical details and purchase links