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The Big-IP came in second, but don't count it out. The easiest of all the products to configure (up and running in less than 10 minutes), the Big-IP delivered phenomenal performance and offers excellent scalability options via load-balancing configurations. We would like to see client certificate authentication, and in talking with F5, we learned that this feature is forthcoming, as is the ability to re-encrypt data to back-end Web servers.

The Big-IP supports a robust set of cryptographic algorithms and, as with all the external products we tested, offers management via SNMP as well.

With an average increase of 400 percent in transactions per second processed, the Big-IP proves that the bottleneck still hindering internally supported SSL accelerators is the operating system and applications. The Big-IP offers a robust set of configuration options -- CLI via SSH (Secure Shell), telnet and console, as well as both secured and unsecured HTTP configuration. Only the CacheFlow SA-725 provides a Web-based GUI for remote configuration; the iSD 2.0 GUI is still being developed. We prefer the Big-IP GUI because it offers the capability to completely configure the system, while the GUI provided by CacheFlow does not enable full control. However, the iSD 2.0's excellent management system and the higher price of the Big-IP (about $2,000 more than the iSD) held the Big-IP back from the top spot.

Big-IP 200 e-Commerce Controller, $17,990. Available: Now. F5 Networks, (888) 882-4347, (206) 272-5555; fax (206) 272-5556. www.f5.com