Tasman routers

Tasman sent two routers for our router filterting tests – the Tasman 1004 and the Tasman 1400.

When it came to pure throughput with 64-byte frames, both boxes delivered wire speed performance no matter how many filters we threw at them. Even with 256 filters and large routing tables, both routers performed flawlessly.

When we checked latency with 64-byte frames, some differences cropped up between the devices. The Tasman 1004 had an average latency significantly smaller than the Tasman 1400.

Compared to the other four vendors in the test, Tasman’s 1004 posted the next-lowest average latency. But it’s maximum latency was nothing to write home about.

When we tested with 256-byte frames, average latency differences among products were somewhat less pronounced. Tasman’s 1004 again had one of the lowest average latencies across all test cases.

Availability is always a concern for any type of network device. While all the routers in this test offer features such as support for failover protocols and/or redundant components, it’s still possible that other factors can take a router out of circulation. Total loss of power is an obvious example – and one that all the redundancy in the world won’t help.

To assess how quickly devices recover from a loss of power, we loaded each router with the same line-rate stream of 64-byte traffic we used in the filtering tests. We did not set any filters or use dynamic routing, so we knew all routers were capable of forwarding traffic at line rate without loss.

Once a router began forwarding traffic, we used an automated power switch to power it off, wait 5 seconds and then power it up again. Because we offered traffic at a constant rate throughout the test, we were able to derive recovery time from frame-loss counts.

The Tasman 1004 and the Tasman 1400 took 83 and 109.4 seconds, respectively, to come back. For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0714rev.html?page=1