You don't have to be a big company to have big load-balancing needs. Coyote Point Systems is aiming its new family of application acceleration and load balancing appliances at the midmarket, and it's making available enterprise features such as SSL acceleration, hardware-based compression, Gigabit-speed throughput, and tools for optimizing application performance in virtualized environments.

But what exactly is the midmarket? Some vendors define midmarket customers based on the number of employees or a company’s annual revenue. Coyote Point instead identifies its target customers by their application needs, which makes sense.

Coyote Point views the midmarket as those companies with strong technical needs -- a significant Web presence or Web application delivery requirement, for example -- but not unlimited budgets, says CEO and CTO Bill Kish. “Their apps are mission critical, and they have high bandwidth requirements, but they don’t have a staff to dedicate to load balancing products or a budget to go buy $40,000 boxes,” Kish says. “They do still have requirements for scalability, high availability, and the management features of high-end products.”

With that in mind, Coyote Point this week unveiled its Equalizer GX family of appliances. Built on new hardware and software architectures, the Equalizer GX appliances provide up to 400% performance gains when compared to earlier Coyote Point models, the company says.

At the low end, the Equalizer 350GX is an application traffic manager with 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports, priced at $6,495. The E450GX, priced at $10,195, is optimized for e-commerce environments and adds SSL offload/acceleration features capable of handling 8,500 transactions per second. At the high end, the 650GX ($14,395) includes all of the features of the E350GX and E450GX, along with an additional 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, hardware-based Web compression, global load balancing capabilities and more.

New to the GX platform are tools for improving the load balancing of virtual servers and applications. Coyote Point offers two flavors of these software tools: Equalizer VLB (included on all models) and Equalizer VLB Advanced (offered optionally on the 350GX and 450GX, included with the 650GX).

Equalizer appliances with VLB configured can monitor VMware vCenter or ESX server to determine the status and performance of virtual machines, the company says. Coyote Point then combines the data from VMware with its own application and network data to better manage the traffic flowing to VMware virtual machines running on ESX server. Companies can optimize load balancing based on resource utilization, for example, or optimize hardware utilization and reduce over-provisioning.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.