I wrote about Redline Networks a couple of weeks ago, when it had completed a round of funding and released a Web acceleration product. Redline is back at it again and last week introduced a line of appliances that the company says significantly steps up its Web acceleration capabilities.

Redline's appliances sit in front of server clusters, offloading I/O processing and reducing the number of TCP connections the servers have to handle. The devices also compress content to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to deliver content.

With its new appliances - the T/X 2600 and the T/X 2650 - Redline more than doubles the capacity of its T/X 2200 series of products, the company says. The T/X 2600 series can support 500,000 simultaneous connections, 128 virtual IP addresses and up to 64 servers per cluster, according to Redline executives. The T/X 2600 also can support 400 SSL transactions per second, and the T/X 2650, using hardware-assisted SSL encryption, can support 1,600 SSL transactions per second, the company says.

The T/X 2600 series appliances are designed for high-demand Web sites that handle huge amounts of traffic, and they have a Gigabit Ethernet interface to take on the load. The appliances can field all types of Web content, including static, dynamic and SSL.

Sabri Sansoy, director of online and interactive technology at Game Show Network, says the T/X 2600 installed very quickly into the company's infrastructure, enabling it to handle growing traffic and improve end user experiences without having to add other hardware or buy more bandwidth.

Redline says the T/X 26000 series appliances can be installed in corporate networks in less than an hour and require no modifications to Web sites, load balancers, caches or clients.

The T/X 2600 is priced at just under $40,000, and the T/X 2650 is priced at just under $50,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.