Fast times for servers and apps

By Phil Hochmuth, Network World
May 10, 2004 12:13 AM ET

Sluggish application servers and bottlenecked data center links are the targets of several new products scheduled to be announced this week at NetWorld+Interop .

On tap are data center switches that could help corporate users make their applications run faster by offloading application and network processes from servers to appliances, vendors say. Also being announced is server adapter hardware aimed at putting fatter network pipes into servers.

Vendors scheduled to launch gear at the show include:

• NetScaler, which is introducing the next release of its 9000-series application acceleration appliance. The NetScaler box, based on Intel Xeon processors and a Gigabit Ethernet backplane, is used in corporate and service provider networks as a server load balancer and Layer 7 application switch, and for HTTP Web traffic compression. The box also can act as a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN termination device.

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The new software compresses TCP-based application data, letting client-server-based programs, such as ERP or database applications, run faster by taking up less WAN or LAN bandwidth. Another new feature lets the NetScaler box cache static and dynamic application and database data from servers, and deliver the data to client machines. The vendor says this feature will help free server processing power and make enterprise applications run faster.

Another feature on the NetScaler box is upgraded support for SSL VPN traffic. The new software lets a NetScaler 9000 support up to 5,000 SSL VPN connections simultaneously (twice as many as were supported on the previous version).

• Coyote Point Systems, which also will have a new application acceleration device at the show. Like NetScaler, Coyote Point's Equalizer Extreme is based on an Intel server architecture. The company is teaming with Dell to offer its load-balancing, SSL acceleration device on a PowerEdge 1750 server.

Coyote Point's product would sit at the edge of a data center and balance traffic among Web and application servers. The device can offload SSL encryption from servers. This could let Web servers that process sensitive data - such as credit card purchases - run faster and handle more connections. The Coyote Point/Dell product costs $10,000.

Gear from NetScaler and Coyote Point competes with products from Cisco, Crescendo, F5 Networks, Foundry Networks, Nortel, Radware, Redline Networks and Top Layer Networks.

• Intel, which will show a new server multi-mode fiber network interface card. It is the second 10G Ethernet adapter from the vendor, following the introduction of its single-mode fiber 10G NIC last year. The new device is based on the same PCI-X interconnect standard as Intel's previous 10G NIC, but is smaller. The NIC supports the 10GBase-SX standard for 10G over multi-mode fiber, with a range of up to 1,000 feet. The NIC is available for about $5,000.

• Also on the NIC front, Broadcom will introduce chips for server adapters that will let NIC vendors combine server and storage networking functions. The NIC silicon combines Gigabit Ethernet with ISCSI storage protocol support, as well as TCP offloading and remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology.

The RDMA and TCP offload features in the silicon are aimed at making servers run applications faster. TCP offload lets a server devote more CPU power to application processing, with network processing offloaded to NIC hardware. RDMA lets the server inject network traffic data into server memory, bypassing the CPU and I/O channels, which can cause latency in high-end applications. Broadcom says the NICs will be available from vendors later this year for about $200.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.