Whether you're boarding an airplane or sending a credit-card number into cyberspace, you want to feel secure -- it's a basic human need. Lately, however, we've noticed how often this need is at odds with our yen to stay on the . . .
Whether you're boarding an airplane or sending a credit-card number into cyberspace, you want to feel secure -- it's a basic human need. Lately, however, we've noticed how often this need is at odds with our yen to stay on the move. Remember the last time you went through airport security? You had to wait, wait, wait.

There's no hope for the line at the airport metal detector, but SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) accelerators have long been touted as the way to speed up secured Web transactions. In our past tests, these products have indeed yielded significant speed improvements. But that was then, and this is now. Nothing we've seen in the past compares with the performance we saw in recent tests performed in our partner labs at Schneider National, in Green Bay, Wis. What's changed? Appliance vendors have moved into the market and, boy, are they leaving older solutions in the dust. In our tests, our iPlanet Web server performed between 40 and 170 SSL transactions per second without cryptographic acceleration. With cryptographic acceleration, the same iPlanet box was able to serve up between 60 and 530 SSL transactions per second. Connect times also fell, from about three seconds for unassisted SSL to subsecond connect times for assisted SSL.

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