Redline Networks this week plans to unveil an appliance that the company says will secure and speed delivery of Web-enabled applications.

The company says its appliance can handle 10,000 new Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections per second. The E/X 3670 doubles the SSL throughput rate of the previous Redline units, says Craig Stouffer, Redline vice president of marketing.

He says the E/X 3670 addresses two concerns associated with SSL applications - performance and availability - and the costs associated with SSL-enabling applications.

"Customers might not be handling that number of connections today, but they are setting the bar high because they don't want to have to re-evaluate and add more capabilities later on," Stouffer says.

The E/X 3670 uses Redline's Auto SSL capability, which is a function of Redline’s OverDrive environment. The OverDrive technology, according to Redline, gives its appliances the ability to read, understand and transform Layer 7 HTTP content streams. This capability lets the product change HTTPS traffic to HTTP traffic on the fly, without affecting the application, Stouffer explains.

"Browsers see SSL traffic, without modifying the back-end application," he says. The E/X 3670 automatically performs management and bulk encryption, which enables customer networks to process more SSL connections.

The new appliance, like the company's other products, also performs data compression, load balancing, connection management, SSL processing, security, authentication and user-defined adaptive content processing. The company says addressing multiple technology tasks with one box provides customers with more security. Redline competes with the likes of F5 Networks and Radware.

Redline's appliance sits behind a firewall in a data center. Customers can deploy two boxes for failover purposes.

The E/X 3670 enterprise application processor will be available in the third quarter, and pricing starts around $63,000. The Redline OverDrive control environment option is priced at $5,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.