* Comparing the application acceleration products
One of the more popular topics in our columns over the past few months has been the various methods for delivering applications quickly and reliably. There are several excellent products for enhancing your network performance, but, even after you’ve made your initial decision to deploy the technology, you have to decide which product to use.
At this point, one of the issues that you may find to be somewhat frustrating is that the products have few – if any – interoperability standards. This is an issue that we hope will be addressed eventually, especially since corporate mergers may well end up with one corporation having standardized on one product and the other on another product.
In the meantime, we have a resource for you that we feel will help you make the decision of which product to choose. Webtorials has teamed with Robin Layland of Layland Consulting to produce the 2006 Application Acceleration Challenge. It is available here.
In this document, which will be followed in a few weeks by a virtual conference, Robin first presents the fundamental issues and then asks the participating sponsors to address what it is that makes their particular solution superior to all others. Consequently, the challenge cuts through the first level of “application acceleration is good” to get directly to the key differentiating issues.
The document – which includes information from Riverbed, Packeteer, Expand Networks, Citrix and Juniper – does not end with a ranking of the products or a “prize” for the best solution. Each product has its particular strengths for addressing a given set of issues, so the “best product” decision is (very appropriately) left to the reader.
While full interoperability would be quite nice, it’s not here yet. So this should at least be a good start on choosing which product you will deploy on your network.
