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Radware on April 24 will up the performance ante in the application-delivery controller space when it introduces its next-generation hardware platform.
The new AS5 platform, based on Radwares three-tiered application delivery architecture, boasts some of the fastest speeds and deepest port density in the market, according to Michelle Blank, chief marketing officer at the companys U.S. headquarters in Mahwah, N.J.
“There is a trend to add more power and functionality into the application delivery controller. Two years ago Radware came out with a unique three-tier architecture for application delivery switching, designed to be able to support two things: growing demand for more power, and higher density,” she said.
The aggregate capacity of the new platform is 6G bps, doubled over Radwares previous high-end AS4 hardware, which supported 3G bps.
The AS5 also boosts Layer 7 performance by using four dedicated network processors to remove processing contention in the controllers main CPU. The CPU continues to execute real-time monitoring, Layer 7 traffic redirection and load balancing, QOS (quality-of-service) traffic shaping and bandwidth management functions along with intrusion prevention and denial-of-service attack blocking.
While the network processors execute Layer 4 and Layer 7 functions, Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching functions are executed in application-specific integrated circuits. The AS5 chassis provides two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 17 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports, wire-speed Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching, and Layer 4 or Layer 7 switching at 6G bps, according to Roy Zisapel, CEO of the company, based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Competing products that use a single CPU are beginning to run into contention issues as users add more application acceleration, security or WAN optimization functions, Blank said. With those architectures, “when you want to scale up you have to add another box. We have a switch that will support more functionality and we couple critical services like [SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption],” she said.
The new hardware platform will run Radwares APSolute application delivery software suite—initially, the suites AppDirector 6000 for optimizing performance for large server farms and its DefensePro 6000 software for high-performance denial-of-service protection for carriers. It can be managed by Radwares APSolute Insite centralized management software.
The new AS5 is targeted at both carriers and large enterprises. For enterprises, it is intended to help support data center consolidation projects by running multiple applications or server farms off the same switch “with no performance sacrifice,” Zisapel said.
“But the more important application is to consolidate Layer 4 and Layer 7 services on one switch. Through the power of the architecture, you can do local and global load balancing, cleaning of traffic, bandwidth management and other services on the same platform,” he said.
For carriers, the AS5 can support up to 500 different customers, or up to 3,000 customers on an extended ISP license, “to drive better profitability on the same services,” Zisapel said.
The new AppDirector 6000 on the new AS5 provides local and global server load balancing, application acceleration and application level security at the faster 6G bps rates. The new DefensePro 6000 Intrusion Prevention System provides multilayered DoS/DDos (distributed-denial-of-service) attack protection at 6G bps.
The new platform is due by midquarter.