The range of network optimization technologies available is enormous - and daunting when you consider that an appliance tuned for accelerating, say, SAP application delivery to remote office employees is very different from one designed to optimize high-speed data replication processes between data centers. Companies have different needs, and vendors are working to fill out their product lines to make sure they've got a product for what each enterprise wants for its different settings.

To round out its product portfolio, Exinda Networks this week is announcing its new Version 5.0 firmware -- a software upgrade that’s all about scalability. With it Exinda upped the efficiency and capacity of its caching technology to make its products suitable for disaster recovery, data replication and other corporate applications involving large files and high-speed Internet links.

The new firmware "is something we've been working on for about 18 months. What it does for Exinda is enable us to now play in markets that we've otherwise not serviced, such as server consolidation, disaster recovery or business continuity planning, and data replication and storage," says Con Nikolouzakis, CEO of Exinda, which has been expanding steadily in the United States since moving its operations from Australia to Boston.

With its Version 5.0 firmware release, Exinda’s new hard disk caching capability yields 1,000 times more caching capacity, the company says. The upgrade also features more efficient stream-based caching to improve application response times and reduce repetitive WAN traffic. (Compare Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization products)

“There are some significant differences in our acceleration engine,” Nikolouzakis says. “One of them is that we’re now doing a hybrid WAN memory -- which is the equivalent of other vendors’ data de-duplication or differencing -- which uses the RAM and the hard disk together. This essentially gives us a thousand times more storage capacity, which is what’s required to operate in those environments.”

Exinda also looked to simplify the deployment of its gear with the new Version 5.0 firmware upgrade. Two new features, called Auto Discovery and Jump Start, let Exinda’s appliances automatically discover other Exinda appliances within the corporate WAN and automatically begin optimizing and accelerating traffic via a default configuration.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.