Perabit SR-50

Continuing our compression session, here’s our analysis of the Peribit’s SR-50, a LAN-based network compression product that includes two 10/100M bit/sec ports.

The local port is connected to the LAN switch, and the remote port is connected to the WAN router. The SR-50 is capable of handling up to 45M bit/sec of traffic. Installation can be completed in less than 10 minutes, and performance in all areas is very strong. Peribit says it has applied DNA pattern matching technology to its algorithm, which is known as molecular sequence reduction.

Ongoing configuration and management are accomplished using a Web-based GUI, although a command-line interface is also available. Both methods require secure connections. Access lists might be employed to prevent unauthorized connections to the device. You also can create a read-only user account so that reports might be viewed.

For skeptical users, a profile mode is available. You can profile the traffic on your network and see what kind of performance gains you might achieve after placing the box inline. Logging is accomplished via SNMP and syslog support. Other benefits include a central management system, the ability to preserve and set type of service/Differentiated Services values, and interoperability with Routing Information Protocol, Open Shortest Path First and Border Gateway Protocol, which means you don’t have to manually specify each subnet you want to turn compression on for, as the list is provided via your routing table.

The SR-50 performed equally well on TCP and UDP traffic without incurring significant latency. In our FTP testing, while a significant reduction of data occurred on the first transmission, the pattern matched to what is in memory and recalled from the cache in subsequent transfers to further lower latency.

A voice-over-IP (VoIP) call placed over the network showed a moderate level of compression. A denial-of-service attack was launched to disrupt the VoIP call, but the attack was easily defended against by placing the VoIP traffic in a prioritized queue.

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0804rev.html