Tasman Networks Inc. last week, biting at rival Cisco Systems Inc.s ankles, launched a new router designed to address a possible performance weakness in Ciscos remote branch office routers.
The Tasman 3120 CSR (Converged Services Router), designed to beat incumbent router players such as Cisco in price and performance, aims to provide wire-speed line rates even when advanced security and QOS (quality of service) functions are turned on in the routers.
“The 3120 can do frame relay, TCP, VPN, firewall, full routing—all the services. But as you activate those, it still maintains wire speed, even with short VOIP [voice over IP] packets,” said Paul Smith, president and CEO of the San Jose, Calif., company.
One early customer testing the new router agreed with Smiths assessment.
“The majority of features we tested in the lab environment shows the performance of the device [remains at], for all practical purposes, wire speed,” said Kamran Sistanizadeh, co-founder and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based Yipes Enterprise Services Inc.
“When you are dealing with processing that needs to take place inside the device to allow the value-added services to be performed, such as Triple DES [Data Encryption Standard], most other vendors device processors take a hit, and the overall throughput of most devices goes down,” Sistanizadeh said. “With Tasman, the internal design is such that performance remains virtually untouched when you are adding those value-added services.”
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