High-performance Software Router

Industry-leading price-performance, scalability, and solution flexibility for all edge, campus, data center and cloud router and site-to-site VPN needs.

Get to Know TNSR

Pronounced “tensor”, TNSR software is Netgate’s answer for businesses, governments, educational institutions and service providers looking for super-scale routing without the six-figure price tag.

Understanding Performance

TNSR has the benefit of a data plane that leverages Vector Packet Processing (VPP) and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) in user space to produce blinding secure networking speed relative to traditional kernel-base approaches. That said, solution performance remains a function of the underlying hardware platform (Netgate appliance, VM, cloud instance), the nature of the network traffic, and the desired level of security enforcement.

Each of the following factors can affect the throughput of your TNSR solution:

Hardware Platform

The faster the CPU, and the more memory at its disposal, the more traffic a TNSR instance can process.

Packet Size

Throughput is often reported in Mbps or Gbps, but a more important measure is packets per second (PPS). Smaller packets translates to more packets per second, and large packets translates to fewer. IMIX is a good real-world benchmark. We openly share TNSR test results for all three.

Encryption

Unencrypted traffic is easier to process, but also has no security. Encrypted traffic takes processing cycles, and encryption schemas vary in their impact on processing speed.

Security Enforcement

Depth and breadth of access control lists (ACLs) will place a tax on packet processing performance.

A Guideline: TNSR on a Netgate Appliance

Given the above, we can't say what your exact performance will be. But, we can give you a benchmark for general competitive comparison. The diagram below shows performance figures for our largest appliance, the Netgate 8300, running iperf3 traffic through TNSR 24.06.

As you can see TNSR pushes the Netgate 8300 to its hardware-based performance limits of roughly 110 Gbps. But, TNSR itself is only limited by the underlying hardware. Give it enough CPU and memory, and the software easily scales to 200 Gbps and beyond.

For performance data on other appliances, view our Netgate appliances carousel.

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The Impact of Hardware Platform on Performance

Netgate Appliance

Netgate offers a range of turnkey appliances - built, preloaded with TNSR software, and tested to specification right in our own factory. See our convenient product comparison chart to select the performance that best meets your needs.

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Cloud

TNSR is available on a range of compute instances in both the AWS and Azure Marketplaces. Each has its own performance spectrum based on CPU, memory and network interface speeds.

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Virtual Machine

Some customers prefer to source their own hardware, and that is fine. There are plenty of options. If you are using TNSR on your own hardware you will need to, on your own, assess both compatibility and performance. In addition to CPU and memory variants, BIOS settings, disk configurations, and NICs will all affect performance.

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