After retiring our old ISP connection last week, we had a spare firewall (a Fortigate 800), which we had planned to pair up with another FG800 that's firewalling our connection to the Connecticut Education Network (CEN - where the schools and libraries get their Internet feed) to give that box some relief. It had been running at a very high CPU utilization at the end of last school year, and there were complaints about slow Internet access from time to time.

Today we brought that second GF800 into play. Wow. I did not expect what we saw -- apparently that saturated CPU on the first box was essentially keeping a lid on a torrent of demand. Within minutes of cutting the three high schools over to the new firewall the combined traffic was up over 120 Mbps. An absolute record for demand, a third more than the original single firewall ever managed, and downright frightening given that we're only four days into the new school year. Usually it takes about a month for Internet traffic to ramp up to the level it runs throughout the year.

Um, I think I may need some bigger boxes.