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The Intel NetStructure 7115 e-Commerce Accelerator showed us acceptable performance increases. Compaq and HP resell the 7115 and plan to introduce branded versions of the product. Like the iSD 2.0 and SA-725, the 7115 offers client certification authentication as well as rudimentary certificate-management capabilities. Unlike the Big-IP and SA-725, however, the 7115 does not provide GUI-based configuration and management.

The 7115 supports a wide variety of cryptographic algorithms, including Blowfish and IDEA. The device reduced the average connection time for midsize Web objects (a single .gif, .jpg, .html and so on) to just over one second, a significant reduction compared with the baseline average of three seconds. While the decrease was not as impressive as those seen with the Big-IP and iSD 2.0 devices, which each provided subsecond connect times, the 7115 performed significantly better than the SonicWall (2.3 seconds) and CacheFlow (1.5 seconds) solutions, and it provided almost 300 SSL transactions per second, besting the 277 transactions per second of the SonicWall SSL Accelerator-Rack Mount (SSL-R).

The Intel 7115 is priced about the same as the iSD 2.0, but we squeezed a lot more transactions per second out of the iSD 2.0--530 vs. 300 for the 7115.

NetStructure 7115 e-Commerce Accelerator, $15,995. Available: Now. Intel Corp., (800) 628-8686, (408) 765-8080; fax (408) 765-6284. www.intel.com