[Bro] building a new bro server

[Allen, Brian]

Hi All-
I currently have a server running BRO, and we are seeing a lot of packet loss.  I am getting quotes for a new server to replace it, and I wanted to run some of the options by this group to see what would be better.

Current server specs:

-2 Processors, 8 cores each at 2.4GHz, so 16 total.  We run 14 bro processes, one per core.  And they run at 100% utilization all the time.
-128G memory
-Intel IXGBE 10Gig network card with pfring

We are seeing 3-4 Gig traffic pretty much constantly, and we spike to 5 Gig.  The bro packet-loss file shows 30+% packet loss most of the time, but during the early morning hours, when traffic drops considerably it will fall to 0.01%.

For one test, we used a bpf filter to block all traffic going to bro except for a one /24 subnet of campus traffic for about 15 minutes and the packet-loss dropped to 0.01%.

So we think our processors are too few and too slow to handle this amount of bandwidth.

Our question as we get a quote to buy a new box is, which is more important for BRO, having the roughly same number of cores but get faster ones, or get more cores at the same or slower speed?

I'm looking at the following two Dell server options, although I can adjust this to add other better possibilities:

Option1:
-Intel Xeon E5-2699, two processors, 18 cores each at 2.3GHz for 36 total
-256Gig RAM
-Intel IXGBE 10Gig network card with pfring

Option2:
-Intel Xeon E5-2687 two processors, 10 cores each at 3.1GHz for 20 total
-256Gig RAM
-Intel IXGBE 10Gig network card with pfring

I'm assuming the first option would be much better but I've never researched this to know for sure, or how much better it would actually be.  I think the difference in price is around $2,400.

I'd like to get one box to handle our bandwidth as it grows over the next couple years, take the current underpowered box and use it is a BRO test box/elastic search server, and build the infrastructure to move to a BRO cluster in a couple years.  Right now a single box would be better for space issues.

I would be really interested to talk to other companies/universities who are running bro in the 3-7 Gig bandwidth range right now so I can see what hardware works for you.

Thanks for your help,
Brian Allen, CISSP
Information Security Manager
Washington University
brianallen at wustl.edu<mailto:brianallen at wustl.edu>
314-935-5380
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/pipermail/bro/attachments/20141208/e2fe9577/attachment.html