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Redline Networks Inc. Tuesday introduced at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, a new Web I/O accelerator appliance designed to better serve the requirements of enterprise applications.
The new E|X 3250 Enterprise Web I/O Accelerator is a Layer 7 switch that can that be configured to automatically rewrite all HTTP requests to HTTPS, exploiting the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption built into current browsers. Applications and browsers dont have to be modified to benefit from the standard security.
“We created a product designed to meet the requirements of intranets and enterprise applications. We support a broader range of authentication on the SSL side. We also added Auto SSL, so that even though a site is set up for clear text, on the fly we convert everything to SSL,” said Roy Johnson, president and CEO of the Campbell, Calif., company.
Redline, a 3-year-old privately held firm, initially targeted externally facing Web applications for its Web I/O accelerator line, which combines compression technology, connection management, and SSL termination and acceleration. But with enterprise applications increasingly using browser front ends, demands for supporting intranets have increased, Johnson said.
Users at the state of New Mexicos Department of Taxation and Revenue found that the acceleration appliances allowed them to greatly reduce the amount of time it took for Web pages to load from a thin-client application and it helped them avoid having to install T-1 lines in certain locations around the state, according to Ed Romero, deputy secretary and CIO in Sante Fe.
“We saw our performance increase by 70 percent. We found we could take a page that [before] took 20 seconds to load down to 8 seconds,” he said. Romero was also pleased with the cost and ease of installation.
The 1U appliance is typically installed behind a load balancer or router, and connects to those devices through a single 100M-bps Fast Ethernet port. It does not require modification of server software and does not require the installation of client software.
Johnson maintained that the combination of SSL acceleration and termination, compression and connection management provided in Redlines appliances is unique. The appliances compete partially with acceleration products from Packeteer, he acknowledged.
The E|X 3250 Enterprise Web I/O Accelerator offloads TCP, HTTP and HTTPS processing from Web servers to boost the performance of Web application servers. By reducing the I/O workload on the servers and lowering the amount of process scheduling the server must perform, individual transactions are processed faster and more users can be supported on a single server. Functions such as request balancing and multiplexing as well as server health checks are also executed out on the appliances. The appliances also reduce the amount of WAN bandwidth consumed by remote users through data compression and filtering.
The new Web accelerator is available now and starts at $29,995.
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