ANTARA.net Announces Next Generation FlameThrower II and BitStressor at NetWorld + Interop Las Vegas 2001.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

Networld+Interop 2001

Booth No. 8048

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 2001

Newest Additions to the Extensive FlameThrower Product Suite

Deliver the Fastest and Most Versatile Internet

Emulation Appliance Available

ANTARA.net, an innovative provider of powerful self-contained network infrastructure stressing and security emulation systems for service providers and business enterprises, today announced the addition of FlameThrower II and BitStressor(TM) to the company's product suite. FlameThrower II makes its debut as the only Internet emulation appliance capable of emulating over 2,000,000 active users and data throughput at gigabit speeds. The optional BitStressor software provides layer 2 and 3 frame level generation, making FlameThrower II the only stressing solution to cover frame to application level traffic emulation.

"FlameThrower determines practical, real-world transactional limits of a site, not just how many packets per second can pass through the wire," noted Valerie O'Connell, managing director, Enterprise Systems Management at the Aberdeen Group. "This is the power to determine the business capacity of a site rather than its theoretical technical limits."

FlameThrower II gives users valuable insight into how well their websites and network infrastructures work under a variety of traffic conditions. By creating real world user and protocol emulation, FlameThrower II generates both normal and extreme conditions to pinpoint potentially fatal problems within a network infrastructure. FlameThrower II is unique in its ability to emulate over millions of individual users actively using a site at rates in excess of 20,000 HTTP hits per second. IT business professionals want to know exactly how to optimize their networks to handle a wide variety of traffic and determine exactly what infrastructure components they need so that they don't spend precious capital overbuilding their networks.

FlameThrower II also incorporates User Personalities(TM), a new feature set that sends traffic that behaves exactly like real users. IT managers can create scenarios that vary connection speed, misconnections, multiple URL destinations, multiple protocol usage and many other attributes to create a mixture of traffic conditions that can show exactly where sites need improvement. The new product stresses firewalls with over 30 defined attack profiles to ensure sites are protected from cyber attacks and will provide VPN and SSL stressing in its portfolio of capabilities.

"FlameThrower II is a significant advancement because it vastly broadens the variety of testing methodologies and performs at rates to saturate any network or device it is testing," said Chuck Kolstad, CEO of ANTARA.net. "Network infrastructures are becoming more complex, especially with the advent of higher performance content delivery devices and challenging new security solutions. We help users understand how a number of devices work in harmony or, more importantly, don't work as envisioned. Our mission is to help users maximize their network investment so they can be confident they have deployed the right resources to ensure quality uptime."

In addition to added application and protocol emulation stressing features, FlameThrower II works in concert with the company's BitStressor software product for layer 2 and 3 frame level generation. Using BitStressor, people can create any type of frame at full wire rate with advanced filtering and decode functionality including IPTOS, VLAN, IPv6, MAC and custom frames both standard and non-standard. BitStressor enhances FlameThrower II to provide an end-to-end network infrastructure verification appliance.

About ANTARA.net

ANTARA.net provides the first truly scalable Web infrastructure stress-testing solution without the limitations of current software technologies. ANTARA.net technology enables network product manufacturers, IT professionals and service providers to validate their infrastructure capacity, performance, integrity, and right sizing by emulating real-world Internet traffic and denial of service attacks. This simple and cost effective means to deploy performance, functionality, and standards based conformance testing from a single platform using powerful ASIC and RISC based architecture can be purchased direct or through an authorized, value-added reseller. Founded in 1998 by Vinod Bhardwaj, a pioneer in networking and creator of the first Ethernet switch, ANTARA.net is headquartered in Campbell, California. For more information, please visit www.ANTARA.net.