• A commercial-grade firewall appliance is a firewall that is completely independent from client computers, it runs on the firmware of a switch, and is maintained through a direct connection to the switch. Via that connection it can be configured to block and allow different kinds of traffic. A commercial grade firewall system basically runs as software on client computers which allows and prevents different kind of traffic from coming and going through a network connection. This is a significant difference because the load of processing incoming and outgoing traffic is now dealt with by client computers, and not a separate box. In order to decrease load problems from servers and other clients on a network, a commercial-grade firewall appliance is highly recommended.