Five-year-old XRoads Networks wasn't the youngest vendor in this market, but it is the smallest system we tested. Buying from a small vendor confers its own set of opportunities and risks. The vendor can be more responsive to your needs, but it might not be able to offer 24/7 support. In XRoads' case, support was next-business-day, and in our tests we had to leave a voice mail message for a technical support person.

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XRoads sent us two EdgePro 5500e units for evaluation. These appliances optimize WAN links via what XRoads calls adaptive TCP tuning, a technique that accelerates TCP sessions by allowing for larger TCP windows and providing anticipatory TCP acknowledgments.

The devices also use data compression to reduce WAN link traffic, and traffic shaping to prioritize it. The EdgePro 5500e units can manage VPN failover by connecting to one of several designated alternate addresses, and they can turn up an alternate VPN when a WAN link fails.

The EdgePro 5500e has an application-filtering feature that relies on the unit's traffic shaping, which identifies traffic by application (VoIP vs. Citrix, for example).

Additionally, the EdgePro 5500e has a simple network-monitoring capability that, from a traffic-density perspective, can show the top 10 applications and top 10 users. When connected to multiple alternate-path WAN links, the 5500e load balances among the multiple links to keep traffic moving smoothly.

WAN OPTIMIZATION EDGEPRO 5500E XRoads Networks

3.6

Price: $6,000. Pros: Superior optimization of Oracle and e-mail traffic. Cons: Small company; potential support concerns. The breakdown Performance 30% 4 Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional 4: Very good 3: Average 2: Below average 1: Subpar or not available Protocol support 20% 3 Ease of use 20% 3 Scalability 20% 4 Documentation/installation 10% 4 TOTAL SCORE 3.6

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The 5500e can perform best path routing (BPR), multi-WAN load balancing and WAN failover to alternate links when primary connections fail.

Through the use of a blacklist, the appliance can filter application content (we found this helpful in filtering music downloads in our tests). The system also can perform rudimentary intrusion detection and prevention, act as a firewall and perform network address translation (NAT).

For Oracle application transactions, we saw an average bandwidth-increase factor of 20.5 from the EdgePro 5500e devices. The boxes achieved an average bandwidth-increase factor of 17.2 for e-mail and Web page traffic, and the units managed a respectable average bandwidth-increase factor of 3.1 for Citrix and VoIP datastreams.