ISPPlanet Cache Review Series - CacheFlow 545

WebPower and CacheSupport Programs
CacheFlow products include a 90-day software / one year hardware warranty and 5x12 technical support with guaranteed callback within 12 hours. CacheSupport Basic ($1,600 for the 545) extends the software warranty to one year and reduces callback to four hours. CacheSupport Advanced ($2,300 for the 545) adds 24x7 monitoring and support, with callback under one hour. Same-day replacement shipping with 15-day return of faulty parts is provided to CacheSupport customers. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for: we found CacheFlow support thoroughly versed in both product features and caching issues.

All customers are granted access to CacheFlow's WebPower on-line support site. This site includes on-line trouble reporting, update, and monitoring, an FTP "drop box" to deliver diagnostic files requested by support, field notices, supported SNMP MIBs, upgrade images, product documentation, and tech notes. CacheFlow makes its response time measurement tools publicly available for Win32, Solaris, and freeBSD platforms. We used CacheFlow measurement tools to supplement Polygraph, generating a very realistic workload, extracted from a regional cache logfile.

Final Words
During one week of continuous testing, our CacheFlow 545 did not experience a single failure. We found ourselves intrigued by CacheFlow's novel approaches. Adaptive refresh sounds promising—we've spoken with users who swear by it, but cannot judge long-term effectiveness from our limited test. Beginners may not love the hybrid "file + GUI" management scheme, but we think most ISP admins will. Add a switch for high-availability and CacheSupport for more realistic price comparison with other products.

CacheFlow 545 $18,995 (as tested) CacheFlow Inc. Sunnyvale, Calif. 94086 http://www.cacheflow.com

Introduction/The Platform	Predictive Caching
Four-Step Setup	Controlling Cache Services
Designing Your Cache Network	Viewing Cache Performance
Managing the CacheFlow	Advanced Monitoring <
Balancing Simplicity vs. Volume	Product Support/Final Thoughts