ISPPlanet Cache Review Series - Wrap-Up

The Second IRCache Bakeoff
NLANR's second IRCache bakeoff was conducted in January, 2000. Participants included those in this ISP-Planet series (InfoLibria, Compaq, IRCache, Network Appliance, Quantex), additional NICS-based products (Dell, IBM, OCD, Microbits, Pionex), and several others (Swell, Cisco, Lucent, iMimic). CacheFlow was a no-show at the bakeoff, but posted independent test results at NLANR.

Bakeoffs are open to any vendor wanting to test performance in a public venue that facilitates result comparison. Bakeoff benchmarks were obtained with the same software used to generate traffic during ISP-Planet evaluations: Web Polygraph (http://polygraph.ircache.net). A specially-designed workload was used to measure peak throughput and mean response time. Published results include price/performance ratios which combine measurements with the "as-tested" price of each product. Bakeoff rules allow vendors to troubleshoot problems and try different configurations while searching for the peak performance point published in the report, but vendors are not permitted to withdraw after testing starts. The Bakeoff report, posted on February 28, 2000, can be found at http://polygraph.ircache.net/Results/bakeoff-2/.

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