ArrowPoint Unveils Web Switches With Three-Fold Performance Boost.

Business/Technology Editors

ACTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2000

Web switch leader expands Content Smart(TM) Web switching 

family with two new immediately-available platforms with

full Gigabit Ethernet uplink support

ArrowPoint Communications (NASDAQ:ARPT) today announced that it has extended its Content Smart(TM) Web switching family with two new Web switch platforms designed to provide small-to-medium Web sites and service provider points of presence (POPs) with customer-focused Web network services at new levels of price/performance. The new platforms, which are immediately available with Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, have demonstrated real-world performance for Web content switching as shown in an independent test conducted by ZD Labs (www.zdlabs.com) on the CS-150.

ArrowPoint's new Content Smart Web Switch products, the CS-50 and CS-150, target Web businesses building highly scaleable networks over the Internet that are optimized for electronic commerce and content delivery. The new products - powered by Web Network Services(TM) or WebNS(TM) software - solve the pressing needs of today's Web sites, as well as extend today's Internet into a scalable, reliable and secure medium for conducting Web business.

"ArrowPoint provides us with a strategic advantage in the extremely demanding, high-end Web hosting and application services arena," said Mike Lough, NaviSite's principal engineer. "As part of our high-availability Web hosting and application service solutions, ArrowPoint's new CS-150 Switches will provide a new level of accessibility, application awareness and performance for our customers whose businesses cannot tolerate downtime or poor Web response time."

ArrowPoint's WebNS software - with "full inspection" URL and cookie switching - features patented content switching technology that enables a new Web services infrastructure. ArrowPoint's WebNS software functions as the "brains" behind ArrowPoint's entire family of high-performance Content Smart Web Switches, including the new entry-level CS-50 and CS-150 solutions, as well as the high-performance CS-800 chassis that has been shipping since the first quarter of 1999.

ArrowPoint's Content Smart Web Switches and WebNS software empower Web businesses to deliver personalized and customer-focused Web services. Unlike other vendors' devices that establish server connections without knowing who the users are, what they are requesting, or verification of resource availability, ArrowPoint's Web switches are the first customer-proven solution providing the combination of performance and scalability with rich functionality.

The new entry-level members of the ArrowPoint Content Smart Switch family include CS-50, which boasts more than twice the performance of the existing CS-100, as well as the CS-150, which will supercede the CS-100 with more than a three-fold performance increase for the same price. Both products benefit from a new high-performance MIPS microprocessor for HTTP flow setup, along with wire-speed flow forwarding engines, to achieve a new level of price/performance. In addition, both solutions support the full complement of WebNS software (http://www.arrowpoint.com/products/webns/index.html), and offer a range of uplink options.

Designed for small Web sites and POPs, the CS-50 is a compact solution providing eight full-duplex auto-sensing 10/100 Ethernet interfaces and one Gigabit Ethernet port. ArrowPoint's CS-150, designed for moderate traffic Web sites and POPs, is a stand-alone solution that provides 12 or 16 full-duplex auto-sensing 10/100 Ethernet ports, or 12 10/100 Ethernet ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports or 4 100Base-FX ports.

"Web businesses realize that their success is reliant on their ability to deliver customer-focused Web network services, so the need for scalable, reliable, high-performance Web solutions has become critical," said ArrowPoint's CEO and founder Cheng Wu. "ArrowPoint's newly expanded family of Content Smart Web Switches with WebNS software enable a broader range of e-businesses to provide fast and dynamic delivery of services according to customer status and transaction priority."

Putting the CS-150 to the test

ZD Labs tested the CS-150's ability to process Web transactions with content policies at an unprecedented level of performance. The test configuration simulated in the ZD Labs test created traffic volumes equivalent to more than 1.7 billion transactions per day, which exceeds levels currently experienced by moderately sized Web server farms and provides today's Web sites with more than enough headroom to accommodate tomorrow's growth.

The server test bed consisted of 12 Web servers running NT Server 4.0 and Internet Information Server 4.0 connected directly to 100MB ports on the CS-150. ZD Labs configured a virtual Internet Protocol (VIP) address on the CS-150, which served as the IP address for the test Web server farm. Two content policy rules were configured in the CS-150 to distribute incoming HTTP requests across the pool of servers. The client test bed consisted of 15 physical PCs, each simulating 20 virtual clients, generating Web content requests. This created the equivalent of 300 unique logical clients, each blasting streams of HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 requests to the virtual IP address of the CS-150.

In the test with 15 clients issuing HTTP 1.0 requests for HTML pages replicated among the Web servers, the CS-150 sustained an average of 4,418 HTTP requests per second from the test clients across two separate test runs, and peaked at 4,635 HTTP requests per second.

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-150 only spoofed the TCP connection for every 20 GET requests resulting in higher performance results for HTTP 1.1. In fact, the CS-150 achieved a peak load of 20,875 HTTP requests per second and averaged 19,875 HTTP requests per second for the duration of the tests.

"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," according to the ZD Labs report. The complete CS-150 report can be viewed on the ZD Labs web site at http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?26222.

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

Pricing and availability

The CS-50 and CS-150 Web Switches with WebNS software are available immediately. The CS-50 platform has a US list price starting at $13,995, and the CS-150 starts at $17,995.

About ArrowPoint Communications

ArrowPoint provides Content Smart(TM) Web Switches and WebNS(TM) software that optimize e-commerce and content delivery. Powered with patented "content switching" technology, ArrowPoint solutions are used by e-commerce, content distribution and Web hosting industry leaders to deliver reliable transactions and prioritized services that build lasting, profitable customer relationships. The company is headquartered in Acton, Mass., with worldwide operations throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and the Pacific Rim. For more information, call 978.206.3000 or visit the company Web site at www.arrowpoint.com.