If you’re attending Interop this week in Las Vegas, tonight is the night show organizers will announce the winners of the Best of Interop. There are seven categories, one of which is focused on application networks and performance.

Three products made the short list in the application networks and performance category:

* AX Series from A10 Networks (booth 2475)
* Virtualization Forensics from Network General (booth 531)
* NX-8504 from Silver Peak Systems (booth 352)

The AX Series application acceleration switch from A10 Networks combines server load balancing and monitoring capabilities. The switch’s Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) delivers multi-threaded performance and enables functions including TCP connection acceleration, SSL acceleration and packet buffer management. The AX switch employs a decoupled CPU architecture with simultaneous high-speed memory access, which enables it to process application traffic in parallel, without the need to copy data or replicate computing instructions, according to A10 Networks.

The second finalist, Virtualization Forensics from Network General, is software aimed at helping IT managers monitor the performance and availability of virtual machines from VMware and Microsoft and correlate that information with monitoring data specific to physical servers.

The challenge of managing virtual environments is an issue that is becoming top-of-mind for IT executives as growing numbers of enterprises deploy technologies to divide physical servers into logical virtual machines that can support different operating systems and applications.

Virtualization Forensics, which is built on the vendor’s Network Intelligence Suite, helps remove some of the manual burden of trying to correlate application performance across virtual machines, physical servers and the network. It combines application monitoring with traditional packet-level network and application traffic analysis. Dashboards present the information from a business-impact perspective, rather than narrow technology performance metrics, Network General says.

Lastly, the NX-8504 appliance from Silver Peak Systems combines WAN optimization functions including disk-based data reduction, compression, quality-of-service, TCP acceleration and loss mitigation. In terms of speeds and feeds, the NX-8504 operates at WAN speeds of 500M bit/sec, with support for 800M bit/sec when only optimizing for network latency. It can support 256,000 simultaneous TCP flows, which lets enterprises connect more offices to a single data center appliance and have more simultaneous traffic flow between large data center links, Silver Peak says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.