Juniper has laid out an 18-month road map that includes improving the capabilities, capacity and management support of its WAN acceleration gear while offering custom acceleration for more individual applications.

Once carried out, the road map will bring Juniper's gear more in line with products from other vendors, notably Riverbed, which also makes devices that improve WAN response times through a variety of means, says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Blue Coat, Cisco, Citrix, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Packeteer and others also compete in this area, and are constantly adding features to develop a full set of application-visibility, acceleration and compression features, he says.

Juniper's WAN acceleration family includes the DX, WX and WCX devices. The DX is a one-end acceleration unit that sits in front of data centers and requires no special equipment at the other end of the connection. It terminates SSL sessions, performs HTTP compression and protects servers from denial-of-service attacks as well as SYN floods.

The WX appliances sit at both ends of corporate WAN links and through a variety of compression and optimization techniques squeeze more data across the connections. Juniper plans to add Web caching, accelerating SSL-encrypted traffic and enforcing what were DX-based, data center-only rules at branch offices. It also plans to add a WX software agent that pushes compression algorithms to remote-access PCs.

WXC devices add data-sequence caching to the WX technology, making it possible to deliver large chunks of data from a local WXC cache rather than calling it from servers at the other end of a WAN connection. The WXC also will receive the WX improvements.

All the boxes are managed by WX CMS, software that monitors WAN performance by application and produces reports by site, device and link. CMS upgrades will make it possible to create new reports, such as how much the gear accelerates individual applications. It also will enable assigning specific management roles to specific individuals and limiting those roles to certain devices on the network. So a department administrator might have access to read performance reports and adjust settings for devices serving his department but not others. A corporate administrator could have overlapping access, plus access to all the other Juniper WAN acceleration gear in the corporate network.