Tarari ships first soft silicon regular expression accelerator.

Tarari Inc. has announced the availability of its simultaneous pattern matching engine capable of providing up to a 40X boost over software. Regular Expressions are a broadly used, industry standard, way of describing complex search patterns. Tarari's new RegEx Content Processor provides a high-speed simultaneous search capability for any content using complex wildcards. Now, for the first time, a broader range of applications including content filtering, anti-spamprotection, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and business and regulatory policy enforcement can all take advantage of this new high-performance technology.

As the dependence on e-mail and the internet continues to grow, so does the need to protect this content by having gateway and server applications filter content. This filtering, however, which relies on compute-intensive pattern matching, dramatically reduces network and server performance. The new Tarari technology, which accelerates and offloads Regular Expression pattern matching at wire-speed, will enable OEMs, ISVs and developers in corporate environments to significantly improve the overall throughput of their solutions.

"Pattern matching using Regular Expressions is the most accurate but also the most compute-intensive way to implement content filtering," said Randy Smerik, CEO of Tarari, Inc. "Many companies have implemented less accurate solutions to avoid a performance penalty, but today, Tarari can offer the best of both worlds--sophisticated pattern matching at wire-speed. As a result, we will soon see a variety of new systems offering far better protection at a far lower total cost of ownership."

According to Brian Burke, IDC analyst, "The overall Secure Content Management software market (which covers antivirus, web filtering and secure messaging) will grow from $2.7 billion in 2002 to $6.2 billion in 2007. Also the market for SCM appliances will grow explosively over the next five years. The SCM appliance market is forecasted to grow from $109 million in 2002 to almost $1.6 billion by 2007."

Regular expressions can be used to specify extremely complex patterns to match when searching through e-mail or web traffic. For example, complex pattern matching enables anti-spam solutions to detect typical spam subject matter even when spammers attempt to disguise their spam (e.g. "vlagra."). Tarari's technology uses a standard POSIX 1003.2 regular expression notation, however, there is the added benefit that they are all executed simultaneously. The Tarari engine is also flexible and accurate, providing exact matches for a large number of patterns on an arbitrary length dataset, with wildcards located in the beginning, middle, or end of the search string.

Anti-spam and anti-virus systems, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and regulatory, privacy and acceptable use enforcement all require the entire text of messages and web pages, including MIME attachments, to be examined for specific words and phrases. Regular Expressions are the most effective means of conducting this examination, but the filtering process can choke servers and gateways by requiring significant system resources. By processing Regular Expressions at wire speed, the Tarari technology will enable ISVs to create more accurate solutions without introducing a performance bottleneck or significantly increasing systems costs.

Network Security Development kits are available immediately from Tarari. The kits consist of two production Tarari Content Processors on PCI cards, Simultaneous RegEx Pattern Matching Agents, (plus Decode, Decompress and Signature Pattern Matching Agents) and API documentation. Since all Tarari Content Processors are fully reprogrammable--all existing purchasers and reviewers may also evaluate the new "Simultaneous RegEx" agent on their existing Tarari hardware.

Tarari Content Processors, which enable extreme acceleration for a variety of compute-intensive applications, are dynamically reconfigurable and can be integrated into application servers, appliances, networking devices, cluster nodes and embedded processors servers. They perform the toughest portions of compute-intensive algorithms, enabling both the inspection of complete messages, packets and XML-rich data as well as computational acceleration at much greater rates than previously possible.