* Ensuring app performance at local and remote locations
IT managers need to ensure application performance measures up at local and remote locations. Among the myriad of tools available to speed performance is Crescendo Networks’ Maestro appliance. The company’s technology-laden box helps customers guarantee critical applications get the bandwidth they need.
Crescendo Networks delivers application front-end appliances to customers in an asymmetrical model – meaning customer need only to deploy an appliance in their data center. The company’s recently added Application Layer Processing (ALP) technology, combined with TCP optimization, SSL acceleration and compression features, can help reduce the processing time for applications on back-end systems such as databases, the company says. Loaded onto a Maestro appliance sitting in front of a Web server farm in a data center, ALP includes a rules engine that based on thresholds would not, for instance, send application requests into a processing queue unless the necessary capacity was available.
The software can also identity requests that would take longer to process, and move other “lightweight” application processing requests ahead of the more process-intensive ones to prevent a backlog from occurring and causing the application to overload.
Rich Goddu, director of networks and systems at TriNet, a provider of outsourced human resources services in San Leandro, Calif., says that putting Crescendo Networks appliances in place ensure his users experience optimal application performance. He says the appliance, which “distinguishes what is in the packets of the application to determine priorities,” has become an integral part of his network that he doesn’t see going away any time soon.
“The Crescendo appliance is part of the network and I see it more like a router or a switch. It’s not going away because it’s more of a network device,” Goddu says. “Things you would worry about at the application layer aren’t as important because it’s becoming a big gray area where the network ends and the application begins.”
For Cory Robin, chairman and CEO of SkyVantage, an airline services company in Salt Lake City, Utah, Crescendo Networks enabled his company to continue growing without making large investments in servers. Robin says he was looking to get a multi-purpose box that would compress, load-balance and monitor the health of servers. Ultimately, the investment in Crescendo enabled Robin to save dollars elsewhere.
“In addition to the SSL and the load balancing with health monitoring and the compression, Crescendo also does TCP caching. It offloads all the connections off of our Web server layer and takes care of them,” Robin explains. “The big beefy requirements of our servers went down dramatically and we were able to deploy less hardware. In the end, we were able to basically double our capacity with the same servers on the back end.”
