Juniper Networks this week is set to unveil new and updated products in its WAN optimization line. The product news partly delivers on Juniper's plans to bring its application acceleration and WAN optimization products up to speed with competitors.

The company, which competes with the likes of Cisco, F5 Networks, Riverbed and Silver Peak Systems, says the new releases will enable customers to replace stacks of devices with fewer higher performing and higher availability devices. That means enterprise IT managers deploying WAN optimization tools - which typically require an appliance on either end of a WAN link in both data center and remote locations - could install fewer appliances to get performance improvements over their wide-area nets.

The company's line of WX appliances falls into this category. This week Juniper is set to debut the WXC 590 platform, which the company says can be deployed in various configurations to support from 140 sites to 840 sites.

"Each of these products can support a larger number of remote sites," says Mike Banic, director of product marketing at Juniper.

Juniper also enhanced its WX CMS product to Version 5.4. The software serves as a central management console for distributed appliances and allows customers to view reports and data collected across multiple WX appliances. The company added flow diagnostics and per-flow statistics to help analyze traffic. Also an e-mail gateway feature lets customers configure e-mail alerts in response to events that may violate preset thresholds or business policies, Banic says.

The WXC 590 platform is available today and pricing starts at about $25,000. The new version of the WX CMS software will be available for download to customers with an active support contract in November. Pricing for WX CMS v5.4 software starts at about $6,000 for a 10-platform license. WXOS software is available now for download to current customers with an active support contract.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.