Foundry Networks and Citrix are two companies planning to use Interop to launch application acceleration tools.

Foundry plans to announce a server offload device; Citrix will launch boxes designed to speed up WAN links; and Adtran and StillSecure will introduce LAN switch and network access control (NAC)-based security gear.

Foundry's ServerIron 4G switch is designed to sit in front of Web and application servers and speed up client access by offloading some security and network functions. The device can take over SSL encryption duties from a Web server and provide server load balancing at Layers 4 and 7, Foundry says.

Click to see: Foundry’s ServerIron 4G includes four Gigabit Ethernet ports and SSL processing offload.

The device includes Web application firewall capabilities, which let it drop connections associated with suspicious behavior, such as incorrect data repeatedly entered into Web forms. It has four 100/1000Mbps copper or fiber ports, and starts at $12,000.

Citrix is announcing two appliances in its WANScaler family, with improvements that speed up WAN performance by reducing the number of bits that have to cross the connection. The 8000-series WANScaler devices, unlike devices in the earlier 6000 series, have disk storage, which is used to store traffic. That makes it possible to scan larger data sets for repetitive blocks that can be replaced by tokens that are sent over the link instead of the bits themselves. Citrix says the use of tokens can reduce traffic by as much as 3,500-to-1.

The high-end WANScaler 8800 for data centers supports 50,000 simultaneous connections and has an 850GB hard drive. It is priced from $40,000 to $94,000 depending on the size of the WAN link it supports, from 10M to 150Mbps. The WANScaler 8500 has a 160GB drive and costs $8,500 to $45,000 depending on the size of the links, from T-1 to T-3.

Citrix also is upgrading software for its NetScaler appliances, which front-end Web servers and speed up transactions. Outfitted with the new software, a single appliance can support as many as 15,000 servers and divide them into service groups. That means if a single service is supported by multiple servers, the appliance can represent the servers through a single IP address.

It also can rewrite HTTP headers on inbound and outbound traffic to mask details about internal network addressing from those accessing servers via the Web. Citrix has added server load balancing for Session Initiation Protocol servers, a feature NetScaler appliances lacked before.

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