Verizon speeds enterprise apps

Verizon Business this week launched a suite of services designed to help companies improve the performance of the applications on their Web sites.

The new managed offerings, called Application Acceleration Services, accelerate the delivery of enterprise and e-commerce software applications, such as e-mail and online shopping carts. The services can also accommodate additional application traffic without increasing bandwidth or data center resources, Verizon Business says, and require no changes to the customer’s applications or infrastructure.

The services include Application Acceleration for manageability, Application Continuity for control over a multi-data-center environment, and Application Acceleration Portal for measurement and control of the performance of applications. Application Acceleration is a stand-alone offering; the Application Continuity and Acceleration Portal offerings are add-on services.

Application Acceleration enables Verizon Business customers to outsource the management of their applications to help ensure consistent end-to-end application and service performance. Application Continuity is designed to provide redundancy for applications by helping to ensure continuous performance and consistent delivery of service in the event of server failure or overload.

Customers assign rules for performance and availability to shift traffic between data centers based on business policies and priorities.

The Application Acceleration Portal is intended to enable businesses to manage, measure, plan and troubleshoot applications and business processes deployed on the Internet.

Verizon Business has partnered with Netli, a developer and provider of application acceleration systems, to deliver its Application Acceleration Services. The Netli Application Acceleration Engine is embedded into Verizon Business’ global IP network to increase application performance across the Internet by redirecting Web site access requests to a distributed PoP near the end user, called a virtual data center.

From there, a Netli proprietary protocol designed to provide a high level of performance over the long-haul segments of the Internet forwards the traffic to an application access point (AAP) located adjacent to the actual data center where the content resides. The AAPs then communicate with data center servers using standard HTTP and TCP protocols, Verizon Business says.

The services are available now for U.S.-based multinational companies with end users in North America, South America, Australia/Asia, China and Europe. Pricing starts at $6,650 per month and Verizon Business is guaranteeing 99.99% availability of the application acceleration network.