ArrowPoint ups cache ante with new Web switches

ArrowPoint Communications will build on its CS family of switches with two additions due to ship this week that are aimed at users with small to midsize Web sites, as well as content delivery providers.

The CS-50 and CS-150 will play to the e-commerce market, where URL-aware switches are being used by companies to provide customers with the fastest content-delivery time possible. The CS-150 delivers at least three times the performance of its predecessor, the CS-100, the company says.

NaviSite and Exodus are already using CS-150 switches and say they provide significant performance gains over the CS-100 switches. Scott Sneddon, senior network architect at Exodus, says his company is using the CS-150 for its ReadyCache content delivery service, which lets users cache heavily requested content at multiple sites.

Both switches typically sit between a server farm and a router or backbone switch on the network. They feature ArrowPoint's WebNS software, which offers URL- and cookie-based switching that lets network managers route traffic to designated servers, helping to eliminate bottlenecks.

The CS-50 features eight full-duplex autosensing 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet interfaces and one Gigabit Ethernet port. The CS-150, designed for midrange-traffic Web sites, provides 12 or 16 full-duplex autosensing 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports, or 12 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports plus two Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports, or four 100Base-FX ports.

The CS-50 and CS-150 Web switches are available now. The CS-50 has a starting price of $13,995, and the CS-150 starts at $17,995.

ArrowPoint: www.arrowpoint.com.