ArrowPoint Boosts Horsepower of CS-800 Web Switch; CS-800 Achieves Industry's Highest Published Transaction Rates for Web Content Switching as Shown by ZD Labs Test Results.

Business/Technology Editors

ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2000

ArrowPoint Communications, Inc. today announced new high-speed processor enhancements that dramatically increase the performance of its CS-800 Content Smart(TM) Web Switch, the industry's only available chassis-based Web switch. In addition, the CS-800 achieved the industry's highest published transaction rates for Web content switching as shown in an independent test conducted by ZD Labs.

ArrowPoint's CS-800 Content Smart Web Switch now delivers more than triple its original processing power, providing customers with the enhanced speed and intelligence necessary to build a global Web network that is optimized for e-commerce transactions and Web content delivery. Specifically, ArrowPoint's CS-800 sports upgraded processors within the CS-800 Content Policy Engine that deliver a 3.5 times increase in hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) switching performance. Available immediately as a standard component in all CS-800s, the new processors provide enough horsepower to handle more than 11 billion hits per day - 24 times more traffic than the industry's top Web site, according to Media Metrix in January.

"ArrowPoint's CS-800 chassis-based Web switch delivers the right combination of industry-leading performance and full URL and cookie switching for content provisioning," said Esmeralda Silva, director of enterprise networks at International Data Corp. "E-business customers have validated ArrowPoint's solution by deploying the CS-800 to scale and manage their mission-critical Web server infrastructures."

Only ArrowPoint's Content Smart Web switching architecture combines both a distributed application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-based flow-forwarding engine plus a policy engine with powerful processing and memory resources, which enable high-value content services with the scalability to support billions of hits per day. ArrowPoint's CS-800 Content Smart Web Switch is a high-performance, modular Layer 5/7 switching platform that enables high-end Web and application hosters and content providers to build scalable, business-critical e-commerce or corporate Web sites. Now armed with more processing power and higher performance for real-world content switching, the CS-800 can process thousands of complex content-based rules and policies. ArrowPoint's patented content switching technology, in combination with the CS-800's carrier-class performance and redundancy, enables Web businesses to allocate site resources for maximum business benefit and competitive advantage, and to develop new services for high-priority customers and content.

Putting the CS-800 to the test

ZD Labs tested the CS-800 and its enhanced policy engine in a test bed that validated its ability to support content policies at an unprecedented level of performance. The test configuration simulated in the ZD Labs test exceeded the traffic levels currently experienced by the largest real-world Web server farms (1).

The server test bed consisted of 47 Web servers running NT Server 4.0 and Internet Information Server 4.0 connected directly to 100MB ports on the CS-800. ZD Labs configured a virtual Internet Protocol (VIP) address on the CS-800, which served as the IP address for the test Web server farm. They configured two content policy rules in the CS-800 to distribute incoming HTTP requests across the pool of servers. The client test bed consisted of 30 physical PCs, each simulating 20 virtual clients, generating Web content requests. This created the equivalent of 600 unique logical clients, each blasting streams of HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 requests to the virtual IP address of the CS-800.

This test created traffic volumes equivalent to over 11 billion hits per day. This is approximately four times as much traffic as that touted in other industry benchmarks, which have generated traffic volumes equivalent to 3.24 billion "hits per day."

In the test with 600 clients issuing HTTP 1.0 requests for HTML pages replicated among the Web servers, the CS-800 successfully sustained an average of 16,604 HTTP requests per second from the test clients across two separate test runs, and peaked at 17,526 HTTP requests per second. Based on the content rules defined, the CS-800 had to "spoof" the TCP connection for each incoming HTTP 1.0 request in order to read URLs embedded in each HTTP header, requiring a significant amount of processing per connection.

The same test was conducted with HTTP 1.1 connections, which were configured to generate 20 HTTP GET requests per TCP connection. In this configuration the clients established a new TCP connection, issued 20 consecutive HTTP request/response pairs over the connection, terminated the connection, and then repeated the process. Unlike the HTTP 1.0 test, the CS-800 only spoofed the TCP connection for every 20 GET requests resulting in substantially higher performance results for HTTP 1.1. In fact, the CS-800 achieved a peak load of 135,242 HTTP requests per second and averaged 130,513 HTTP requests per second for the duration of the tests.

"The CS-800 sustained high levels of HTTP throughput throughout our battery of tests," according to the ZD Labs report. "We saw consistent performance results throughout the duration of each test run as well as across multiple test runs, even when the switch was required to perform a high level of processing for each HTTP request." The complete CS-800 report can be viewed on the ZD Labs web site at http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?26222.

When testing this new generation of Web switches, ZD Labs has demonstrated that it is important to construct scenarios that test performance and intelligence with extremely high volumes of real HTTP traffic, representing a superset of real world conditions.

"Until now, traditional switch vendors and test labs have focused on measuring Web switch performance for sub-tasks vs. complete HTTP transaction workload," said ArrowPoint's CEO and founder Cheng Wu. "Tests that only measure processing speed for partial connections and/or packet forwarding do not accurately reflect what customers can expect from a Web switch in production Web networks. ZD Labs is the first independent lab to publish a test that evaluates Web switches on their ability to process full HTTP transactions for extremely high traffic volumes, ensuring Web traffic performance needs are met in the real world."

For more information about testing Web switches, please go to www.arrowpoint.com for ArrowPoint's white paper titled "Testing Stateful Networking Devices for Web Applications."

Pricing and availability

The CS-800 Content Policy Engine is available immediately via a new Switch Fabric Module (SFM) that ships with all new CS-800 systems. An additional SFM may be purchased for new systems, or may be purchased as an upgrade for existing CS-800s at a list price of $15,995.

About ArrowPoint Communications

ArrowPoint provides intelligent Web Switches that help customers deploy global networks optimized for e-commerce transactions and Web content delivery. Based on patented "content switching" technology, ArrowPoint solutions are used by companies engaged in electronic commerce, value-added Web and application hosting services, Web publishing, and broadband content services. The company is headquartered in Acton, Mass., with regional offices in Canada, the United Kingdom and Singapore. For more information, call 978.206.3000 or visit the company Web site at www.arrowpoint.com.

(1) Based on March 2000 Media Metrix data.