Cisco, Juniper pry open WAN links

Rivals Cisco and Juniper are set to announce products that could bolster the speed and efficiency of corporate wide-area connections.

While not going toe-to-toe with their new products, both companies are addressing problems that arise when corporations consolidate their servers, forcing more traffic to traverse a WAN to centralized data centers.

Until recently, corporate IT customers accepted buying individual boxes for server load-balancing, security such as SSL offloading and firewall capabilities. But with resistance to rolling out niche boxes growing, vendors such as Cisco are looking to consolidate features.

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Rivals Cisco and Juniper are set to announce products that could bolster the speed and efficiency of corporate wide-area connections.

While not going toe-to-toe with their new products, both companies are addressing problems that arise when corporations consolidate their servers, forcing more traffic to traverse a WAN to centralized data centers.

Until recently, corporate IT customers accepted buying individual boxes for server load-balancing, security such as SSL offloading and firewall capabilities. But with resistance to rolling out niche boxes growing, vendors such as Cisco are looking to consolidate features.

The company this week is expected to announce a multifunction blade for its Catalyst 6500 switches that promises to speed and secure application traffic.

Separately, Juniper plans to announce software at May's Interop conference that will let carriers manage Juniper WAN-acceleration boxes as part of customer services that could let businesses put off buying larger, more expensive WAN connections.

Cisco's Application Control Engine (ACE) is a blade that slides into its Catalyst 6500 switches and performs several functions typically handled by load balancers, compression devices and application-acceleration devices, the company says. The blade will reside in a switch deployed between a server and the WAN to improve traffic flow. It can be segmented logically via virtual partitioning support; one blade can be divided into 250 partitions, Cisco says.

Cisco also is announcing upgrades to its Application Velocity System (AVS) device, which provides application-layer security for server farms.

In concert with an ACE blade, AVS 6.0 inspects application traffic, enforces policies and collects logs for security forensics analysis. Cisco says the ACE module has slots for daughter cards that eventually will support AVS software.

Industry watchers say while Cisco is providing a solid product in ACE, it may have waited too long to wade back into the application-acceleration market, which in 2005 represented about $1.2 billion in revenue for vendors worldwide, according to Gartner.

Earlier in the decade, Cisco had dominated the technology area, ahead of competitors such as Citrix/NetScaler, F5 Networks and Foundry Networks, but it apparently lost interest with the then-$300 million market, according to Joel Conover, a principal analyst with Current Analysis. Other vendors such as Radware and Juniper, with its Redline Networks acquisition, also could provide competition for Cisco's ACE product.

Using technology in its content-switching module (CSM) and adding the AVS technology acquired with FineGround, Cisco is attempting to win back some customers. ACE does not replace the CSM module, though Cisco says it put many CSM features, such as content-switching and server load-balancing, into ACE. Cisco proposes customers run the two modules side by side until it adds more CSM features to the ACE.

"If you're a Cisco customer, you'd have to seriously consider this product, as Cisco is investing in this area with vigor, but if you want absolute best of breed on a feature-to-feature basis today, you might decide to go with a competitor," Conover says.