* Application acceleration market poised for growth in 2007
As the new year kicks off, start-ups in the application acceleration market are already doing their best to get ahead. The market is poised for growth according to industry watchers such as Gartner and IDC, and newcomers will have to fight for every customer account as experts predict incumbents will dominate going forward.
One upstart, Ipanema Technologies, a France import that offers application traffic management systems and competes mostly with Packeteer, went so far as to have The Tolly Group evaluate the effectiveness of its technology. The tests performed by the independent test lab, Ipanema executives say, prove that Ipanema System Version 4.3 can “guarantee” performance on mission-critical business applications.
“We realize it’s not about acceleration in all cases, it’s about real-world quality of experience for the end user or customer,” says Vargha Moayed, executive vice president at Ipanema. “We created a test environment with mesh traffic because in real world scenarios there is a lot of competition for bandwidth among many branch offices and end users. We wanted to be able to show from the end-user experience what our system could deliver.”
Ipanema uses a centralized server loaded with its software on which application performance objectives are predefined by network managers. Distributed devices — at redundant data center or disparate offices — perform a real-time analysis of global traffic and application mix, the company says. Sites not equipped with hardware devices — yet connected to the central data center via the WAN — still receive the benefits of the optimized traffic as traffic management policies are computed for all sites to match application performance objectives.
The system proved to work in Tolly Group’s tests, which used estimated MOS scores for VoIP performance and the Apdex Index for application performance as guidelines. According to the company, Tolly Group engineers in October 2006 put the system through a series of tests that involved running “multiple applications in a simulated headquarters/remote office three-node network.” The tests benchmarked before and after results.
“These comprehensive tests showed that the Ipanema System can guarantee application performance in congested WAN scenarios even when multiple applications and sites were competing for limited WAN resources,” wrote Tolly Group CEO and President Kevin Tolly in an Ipanema press release.
