KVM switch and network infrastructure management firm Avocent recently signed on with Blue Coat Systems to make working among the company's more than 25 global locations more efficient and secure.

Dan Tice, director of global IT, says he started his search for technology to improve application performance across the WAN when he realized there was "a user perception that things were moving too slowly."

"We realized the same files were being repetitively moved across the WAN and needed to make it more efficient, but we didn't want to have people using our T-1s for the wrong content," Tice explains.

The combined need for acceleration and security is what drew him to Blue Coat Systems' SG appliances and Multiprotocol Accelerated Caching Hierarchy (MACH5) technology. Blue Coat Proxy SG appliances are positioned between users on a network and the Internet and serve as a central point of control over Internet traffic. A termination point for Web communications on the network, the appliance can apply numerous policy-based controls to Web traffic and requests before delivering content to users.

MACH5 technology is part of the operating system of Blue Coat's Proxy SG appliance. The technology addresses five areas: bandwidth management, protocol optimization, object caching, byte caching and compression, and will augment the appliances, which perform Web filtering, spyware detection and secure content scanning.

Tice says the appliances have been working mostly at content filtering, for close to two months now, and he plans to put the MACH5 technology to use following that. He says the technology will help acceleration traffic and prohibit access, while also being transparent to the end user -- meaning end users can work as they always have, but enjoy better performance from the network and applications.

"Blue Coat enables us to keep people from using our T-1s for the wrong reasons, and essentially they kept the bad stuff off and will make the good stuff run faster," Tice says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.