Tarari's New Silicon Helps Network Security Devices Stop Felonious Assaults; As Threats Go From Mischievous to Felonious, Tarari Helps Network Security OEMs Stay Ahead With the Only In-Silicon Support for PCRE and Streaming.

LAS VEGAS -- Tarari, Inc., the award-winning acceleration company, today announced the fifth generation of its Regular Expression Content Processor (RegEx 5). Tarari's "Content Processor" products are ASICs, production boards, and embedded software components that are designed to snap in to networking, appliance, blades, and server systems.

Internet attacks continue to increase in number and sophistication, wreaking more havoc than ever before. According to IDC, "Today, more sophisticated attackers, often organized crime, are increasingly using worms and viruses to obtain credit card numbers, bank account information, and other personal information to perpetrate identity theft. IDC believes this profit-driven motivation will cause the number of attacks to increase in sophistication, frequency, and severity."

Recognizing the need to stop every threat from reaching networks, vendors strive to offer more powerful solutions throughout the infrastructure. IDC sees revenue for XML and Network Security products exceeding $21 billion by 2008, with the unified threat management (UTM) appliance market alone topping $5 billion by 2009. To ensure their solutions can keep up with the ever-growing and evolving threats, OEMs turn to solutions from Tarari.

RegEx 5 includes all the features of the Tarari RegEx 4 Content Processor--which won multiple NSDC "Best of" awards last October--and now accelerates PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression), which is the most sophisticated language for detecting today's most insidious threats. RegEx 5 also supports "streaming" mode for cross-packet inspection, an important strategy for intrusion prevention and virus detection.

RegEx 5 supports 32 & 64 bit Linux, BSD Unix, Microsoft Windows, and Solaris, as well as Intel & AMD multi-core processors, PowerPC, ARM, and MIPS-based Communications Processors such as the Broadcom Quad core BCM 1480 and Raza Microelectronics(TM) Inc. (RMI(TM)) XLR processors. A number of Tier 1 software and hardware vendors have already begun incorporating Tarari RegEx 5 into their products.

"Over the last year, the destructive and dynamic nature of attacks has challenged Network Security vendors to wring every ounce of performance from their systems," said Randy Smerik, president/CEO and co-founder of Tarari. "The threats are growing much faster than Moore's Law, and Tarari's fast-to-market development cycle allows us to bring new functionality, such as the ability to accelerate PCRE in silicon, to OEMs on a six-month cycle instead of the 12 to 18 months required by most developers. Our pace of development is critical to the ability of vendors to keep ahead of the threats."

"Security remains the Achilles Heel of every network, but the ability of Tarari to keep expanding the capabilities of its RegEx Content Processor means Network Security vendors have a powerful ally in their seemingly endless battle," said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst for The Linley Group. "The Tarari RegEx 5 performs deep-packet inspection without hampering throughput, and now does so with more features and on more platforms. This enables even more sophisticated solutions, especially for Intrusion Detection and Prevention and UTM appliances, which face the greatest performance challenge."

The new family of RegEx Content Processors joins Tarari's comprehensive product line of boards, ASICs and software components designed to accelerate and offload network devices, switches and servers. Tarari also offers software-only versions of the RegEx 5 engine, enabling OEMs to accelerate multiple network security applications - from 10Mbps to 10,000Mbps (10Gbps) - all from a single API.

PCRE

The pattern-matching versatility of PCRE offers vendors a huge leap forward in the ability to target specific threats. Many have compared the improvement of PCRE over POSIX regular expressions to the improvement of Google over earlier search engines, with the ability to get far more accurate and specific results. For example, PCRE enables "back-reference matching," which allows detection systems to compare the domain that an email is sent from with the actual "from" field that the reader sees--one way to spot sinister email. POSIX-based regular expression systems are not capable of doing this. While PCRE is the language of choice for developing the most sophisticated detection systems, it has been until now available only as software, which meant serious performance degradation for high-volume processing. RegEx 5 is the first and only in-silicon acceleration engine to support PCRE, enabling PCRE-based detection at the highest possible data rates.

Streaming

Tarari RegEx 5 now supports streaming for cross-packet inspection for network applications. Scalable to 10 Gbps, Tarari RegEx streaming provides unique intrusion prevention capabilities in packet-oriented network security devices. Cross-packet inspection allows the system to remember previously detected patterns when subsequent packets from the same session are examined, even if many other packets are inspected in between.

"The need for intrusion prevention is now critical to the health of every network, and OEMs must offer ever more powerful and sophisticated solutions to their end users," said Doug Makishima, vice president of marketing at Intoto. "The new features in Tarari's RegEx 5 Content Processor will enable us to provide our customers with the most robust, most complete intrusion prevention platform available."

Availability and Pricing

The Tarari RegEx 5 technology will be available this quarter for evaluation as part of Tarari's RegEx Content Processor Development Kit, which includes a production Tarari Content Processor, Software RegEx, and common API documentation. Volume production will be available in Q3.

RegEx 5 is available in several configurations:

1) Software only for entry level systems, with throughput of 10Mbps to 500Mbps;

2) RegEx 5 with Tarari's T9000 ASIC, for systems running 1 - 3 Gbps, and

3) RegEx 5 with Tarari's T9000 ASIC and one or two additional reprogrammable Content Processing Engines, for systems running at 3 - 7Gbps.

4) RegEx 5 with multiple Tarari T9000 ASICs and one or more additional reprogrammable Content Processing Engines, for systems running 5 - 10Gbps.

For more information contact [e-mail]. For additional technical information, visit www.tarari.com/regex.

About Tarari, Inc.

Tarari, the award-winning acceleration company headquartered in San Diego, Calif., USA, designs and develops Content Processor silicon to allow original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to accelerate and offload compute-intensive, complex algorithms used in XML/Web Services, Network Security and Digital Media environments. Tarari is a fabless semiconductor company whose product line primarily includes ASICs, and Tarari also offers boards and software acceleration components designed for network equipment, appliance and server vendors, as well as independent software vendors. Tarari is a privately held company with venture backing from Crosspoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Miramar Venture Partners, XMLFund and Intel Capital. For more information, visit www.tarari.com, e-mail: [e-mail] or call 858-385-5131.

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