* NetContinuum’s NC-2000 Application Security Gateway
As the application acceleration market continues to converge, so do features and products from vendors in the market. The latest news comes from NetContinuum, which last week announced an appliance that combines application acceleration with security.
The NC-2000 Application Security Gateway marries the capabilities of NetContinuum’s application firewall technology with load balancing, traffic switching, SSL encryption and application acceleration.
Company representatives say they simply followed customers’ lead when putting the multiple capabilities in one box. “Customers are buying into the idea of convergence,” says NetContinuum CEO Gene Banman. “Customers want to assure availability, manageability and security – and that is approximately the order of things we do to the traffic with our box.”
In fact, a recent company survey found that 75% of its customers are already using the optional traffic management features of the company’s flagship Web application security gateway, the NC-1000. With the NC-2000, NetContinuum made it official. According to Banman, F5 Networks, with its June acquisition of MagniFire, is one competitor also trying to put traffic management and security features on one appliance.
“With this type of approach, customers can get a single view of the total health of their application,” Banman says. “We suspect F5 will have a product out similar to this following the acquisition.”
The NC-2000 sits between a router and an application server, or between a corporate firewall and the application server, in customer data centers. It consolidates network, application and XML firewall, caching, compression, load balancing, traffic switching, SSL acceleration and logging into one device, the company says. The appliance is based on AMD Opteron processors.
The NC-2000 can manage and secure 7,300 Web application transactions per second. It can also complete 9,000 SSL 1,024-bit handshakes per second, more than 52,000 HTTP transactions, and more than 62,000 TCP terminations per second, the company says.
The NC-2000 ships with the new NetContinuum Secure Application Management Console, which is software independent of the appliance that can run on a laptop or workstation.
The $55,000 NC-2000 is in beta tests now and is expected to be generally available in August.
CORRECTION: In last week’s edition of the Network Optimization newsletter, entitled “Competition for app acceleration dollars heats up,” I mistakenly transposed two companies involved in an acquisition. It was Akamai that acquired Speedera earlier this year. My apologies for the error.
