This number is important when sizing the accelerator you want to purchase. You'll need to be sure that the product you choose is not only capable of handling today's load but is capable of scaling as the number of secure transactions being processed grows. Some vendors, such as nCipher and Rainbow, offer multiple internal products handling 300 to 800 tps (transactions per second) while others, such as AEP, target high-volume processing--2,000 tps and up. If the accelerator you select can't support the tps rate you require on a single machine, and you're limited in the number of expansion slots you can use to add cards, reconsider deploying an external solution. If the tps number you're trying to support exceeds what your internal solution can handle, you'll see increasingly longer response times, which is just what you deployed the solution to prevent.
External acceleration devices generally come in a one-size-fits-all configuration. A fixed tps number is offered by a variety of vendors including Array, NetScaler, Nortel Networks, Rainbow and SonicWall. F5 offers a one-size-fits-all solution but also provides a convenient scaling option that lets you start with 100 tps and license additional transactions. Scaling with an external device requires much less configuration and labor because you only have to integrate a single device into the network rather than deploy a new server--the hardware, the OS, the Web server, the accelerator and the certificate.
Lori MacVittie is a Network Computing technology editor. Write to her at [email protected].
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