Sensory Networks Delivers 10Gbps IPS Software Acceleration Solution

Company’s Innovative Software Accelerates Intrusion Prevention (IPS) Performance to 10Gbps While Running on Low-Cost Platform Without Any Specialized Hardware

PALO ALTO, CA–(EMWNews – August 6, 2008) – Sensory Networks, the leader in pattern

matching and acceleration software technology, today announced their

HyperScan™ and FastChannel™ software hit 10Gbps IPS throughput, for

both UDP and HTTP traffic. The end-to-end system solution is based on a

standard Intel® Quad-core Xeon platform, without any specialized

hardware, running Snort® IPS with the SourceFire® VRT rule set. This is

the latest in a series of breakthroughs the company has recently announced

as it continues to demonstrate to the industry the impact of using software

to push the envelope in price/performance, scalability and deployment

flexibility.

“We are particularly pleased with our HTTP, small packet and latency

performance, as these are areas that present many technical challenges for

designers,” said Sab Gosal, VP of Marketing for Sensory Networks. “As we

look to scale beyond 10Gbps, the real power of our software centers on the

fact that the same suite of software libraries can also scale down to

sub-200Mbps applications while supporting a common API, feature set and

integration cycle.”

HyperScan is a highly portable, easy-to-integrate pattern matching engine

that, aside from full PCRE support, comprises several underlying content

scanning engines that leverage cache memory to scan hundreds of thousands

of patterns simultaneously at multi-gigabit speeds. Each engine is unique

and tailored for a different task, and tuned to deliver optimal performance

for certain parts of signatures, expressions and applications. Also, an

intelligent compilation stage partitions, optimizes, and transforms the

signature database for use in multiple engines simultaneously, delivering

both the optimum performance and complete signature support.

FastChannel is a proprietary zero-copy, context-switch free packet

processing software library that manages and dynamically distributes

network traffic across CPU cores. FastChannel contains many innovations

that allow user-space applications to handle network traffic at performance

levels comparable with kernel-space implementations.

The IPS performance characteristics listed below were benchmarked using

industry standard specifications and guidelines, and have been demonstrated

to several tier-1 vendors:

--  10Gbps UDP throughput

    

--  10Gbps HTTP throughput

    

--  150,000 HTTP connections per/sec

    

--  40 - 250usec latency

    

--  2Gbps small packet performance

    

“There is no single metric which clearly defines a product winner in the

security and networking applications space. This is why at Sensory we have

been developing technology to cover small packet performance, latency,

throughput, connections per second, supported rule count, and PCRE

compatibility,” said Paul Glendenning, VP Engineering Services for Sensory

Networks. “Collectively, HyperScan and FastChannel software are the first

of their kind to deliver on these types of performance parameters needed

for applications such as IPS.”

“The device under test we used for the benchmarking was tested to have a

routing limit of 11 – 12 Gbps,” said James Gregory, Senior Engineering

Manager for Sensory Networks. “By using HyperScan and FastChannel software,

we have pushed Snort IPS UDP and HTTP throughput performance close to this

limit. The results also show that HyperScan’s pattern matching alone

provides an incremental 60% gain in throughput, above and beyond the gains

achieved using FastChannel.”

Further details of Sensory software products and test results can be

downloaded at

www.sensorynetworks.com/Products/Downloads/_Item/10Gbps-IPS-Solution-using-Sensory-Networks.pdf/.

About Sensory Networks

Sensory Networks is a provider of software pattern matching and

acceleration software solutions that enable networking and security

equipment vendors to significantly improve the packet processing

intelligence and price/performance of their platforms that support resource

intensive applications such as: Intrusion Prevention (IPS), Antivirus (AV),

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and Content Filtering. The Company’s HyperScan

and FastChannel software libraries, while running on low cost, off the

shelf platforms are designed to operate with a wide range of applications,

both commercial and open-source, and provide up to 10Gbps throughput

performance with the potential to scale to 30Gbps in specific environments.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Sensory Networks has a regional office

in Sydney. www.sensorynetworks.com

Media contact: Mick Johnson Director of Product Marketing Sensory Networks +1 (650) 521 4477