Data sheet Price as tested: Single box, $55,000. Four-way box, $220,000.

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When Juniper bought Redline last year, it bought a ton of application-acceleration features. The DX 3600 sports virtually every acceleration feature discussed in this test, along with powerful rules for classifying traffic based on application-layer content. And Redline insisted on supplying four appliances linked with its ActiveN failover mechanism to show off the device's internal load-sharing and high-availability features (even though we weren't testing the latter).

For all that, though, a single DX 3600 is only a modest performer (see services and scalability test results). A single DX 3600 delivered nowhere near the same performance as, say, the Citrix NetScaler Application Accelerator, its closest direct competitor in terms of features (see feature comparison), in just about any of our tests.

On the other hand, four systems linked together were quite powerful, and Juniper says it recommends simply adding more boxes as customers require more scalability. That adds significantly to the price tag, but for customers needing a full feature set and scalable performance, this may be a viable option.

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