Juniper this week plans to introduce hardware and software that can speed remote-site and data center traffic while helping customers reduce hardware and save money.

The company is expected to announce a top-of-the-line IP WAN acceleration box that boosts application performance between branch offices and headquarters, and a router that scales down its carrier-grade technology to corporate needs and budgets.

It is releasing gear that accelerates Web transactions for less.

"These are a bunch of independent product launches, but they all have an impact on the data center," says Rob Whiteley, an analyst with Forrester Research, who adds that the gear will help Juniper compete with Cisco, Citrix and F5 Networks.

Juniper is uncrating a new WAN-acceleration appliance that supports 45Mbps of throughput as it compresses, caches, optimizes TCP flows and speeds up applications. WXC devices are deployed at both ends of WAN links to squeeze more data across the connections. The WXC 590 is designed for sites with high-bandwidth WAN links that have to make connections with scores or even hundreds of remote sites, he says.

Click to see: Juniper’s WXC 590 and DX 3280 can speed WAN

Mustang Engineering in Houston, for instance, uses Juniper's current top-speed WXC 500 with 20Mbps of throughput at two sites with 40Mbps WAN connections. A WXC 590 could fill the entire link by itself, whereas it would take two WXC 500s and a separate device called a WX to tie them together to gain the same throughput, says Keith Wingate, network administrator for the firm.

The list price of the three boxes needed in that configuration is $105,000, while a single WXC 590 with the same capacity costs $46,000.

The new WXC 590s can be stacked in conjunction with a WX 100 to support a 155Mbps OC-3 link and connections with as many as 840 remote sites.

Wingate says Mustang's WXCs reduce traffic 40% to 70% of its original size, depending on the application. This makes applications perform quicker and reduces user frustration, he says. "As Mustang acquires other companies in various parts of the U.S. and the world, we need to have these remote offices tie back into our home office, and it has to be as painless and quick as if they are next door," Wingate says.

Beyond its WAN-acceleration gear, Juniper is announcing upgrades to its line of Web server front-end devices that load balance and offload processing from the servers. The boxes also protect servers from denial-of-service attacks and SYN floods.