Some big players in the network arena last week shared details about their plans for application acceleration - and revealed significantly divergent paths.

Two vendors -- Cisco and 3Com -- are bolstering their respective application acceleration offerings. Cisco is taking the in-house approach, unveiling a new load-balancing appliance aimed at small and midsize deployments. 3Com is going a different route, partnering with specialist Expand Networks to offer a WAN optimization module that plugs into its routers.

Juniper, meanwhile, retreated a bit from the application acceleration market and acknowledged it plans to discontinue its DX line of devices that combine load balancing, Web transaction processing and security features.

It has become clear over the last few years that as the WAN optimization market heats up -- and it is heating up -- network industry veterans would be looking to add more application acceleration and traffic management features to routers and other traditional network gear. Cisco has been moving in that direction for a while now, and the new appliance is its latest play.

But adding WAN optimization into the routing platform isn’t a slam dunk. 3Com’s strategy of working with a specialist like Expand Networks hints at an issue that may be at the heart of Juniper’s retreat from developing its own application acceleration gear: The competition among established specialists such as F5 Networks and Riverbed Technology (and many others) is going to make it difficult in the short term for traditional network gear-makers to offer a compelling combination of routing and acceleration technology that stands up to comparison.

Here are a few more details about each of the three newsmakers:

* Cisco ACE: Cisco’s new Application Control Engine (ACE) 4710 is a stand-alone load-balancing appliance that can handle up to 2Gbps of application traffic and 50 virtual partitions for granular policy control. Cisco also unveiled a mobile client, WAAS Mobile, that provides acceleration options for mobile and remote workers, and an application profiling service designed to help customers get a clearer picture of performance problems and opportunities.

* 3Com’s plug-in: 3Com is beefing up its Open Services Networking (OSN) model, which provides a means for customers to add applications from 3Com’s partner vendors to their network infrastructure. With OSN, customers can add applications and functions to 3Com’s MSR line of multiservice routers by selecting modules such as security, VPN, VoIP and now (with technology from Expand Networks) WAN optimization and application acceleration. 

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.