Greater application visibility can lead to more effective application control. To that end, Expand Networks last week released a new version of its operating system software that's designed to deliver more a more detailed view of application traffic to users of its WAN optimization appliances.

The OS upgrade adds a Layer 7 QoS engine and the ability to operate in “firewall transparency” mode, Expand says.

On the QoS front, automatic discovery features can recognize more than 400 applications to provide more useful traffic details and allow IT teams to fine-tune WAN provisioning efforts.

Combining Expand’s new QoS capabilities in a single appliance with WAN optimization features such as compression and caching enables enterprises to more effectively prioritize business-critical applications while restricting rogue or recreational applications, Expand says.

“WAN optimization delivers improved application response times and network capacity, but if that extra capacity is not being controlled it can cause bad traffic to be optimized with a detrimental effect on the performance of the organization’s most important applications,” said Expand's CTO Efi Gatmor in a statement.

On the deployment front, Firewall Transparency Mode (FTM) is designed let enterprises deploy Expand’s gear without having firewalls and other security gear cripple its ability to perform. FTM is completely transparent and compatible with firewalls and intrusion detection systems, according to Expand. Users can decide how to encapsulate optimized traffic across the WAN in UDP, IPCOMP, RTM or IPSec.

Meanwhile, in other WAN optimization news, F5 Networks and Citrix Systems also released product upgrades in recent days.

F5’s software upgrade allows its Big-IP acceleration devices to secure and speed links among corporate offices. “Previously these Web front-ends accelerated traffic just between Web servers and individual users, but with the box-to-box support, they can speed up traffic transfers between sites,” writes my colleague Tim Greene.

For its part, Citrix enabled its NetScaler Web application-delivery appliance to support two-way proxying that cuts the numbers of servers needed for highly interactive Web 2.0 applications. New software called NetScaler Web 2.0 Push offloads connection management from servers and can yield dramatic reductions in the number of Web servers needed, Citrix says.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.