* Application acceleration tools will evolve for data center acceleration
A recent report from Forrester Research says that while application acceleration tools continue to proliferate from a variety of vendors with different approaches, IT buyers will need to home in on tools providing consolidated features and companies with staying power.
Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel wrote in a September market overview on application acceleration that by 2006 the market will have shrunk – from about a dozen various approaches to five new market definitions. And the firm says between five and 10 will offer multiple capabilities in one product.
Vendor focus will also shift from commodity technologies – such as static caching and server I/O acceleration, which will be subsumed by other products – to larger product plans that branch out into data center acceleration and application-specific acceleration.
“By 2006, the market will be dominated by the server load balancing vendors on the data center side, the IP traffic management vendors on the WAN side, and the branch-office automation vendors on the branch office side,” Mendel concludes in the report. “We will see a shift from caching and [content delivery networks] to virtualization of resources.”
Server load balancing products that are expected to evolve into data center acceleration technologies – which Mendel says will optimize the speed of servers in a data center – will be provided by vendors such as Cisco, F5, Radware, Nortel and Foundry Networks. Another market subset, branch-office acceleration products, will also come from Cisco, but its competitors will change to Network Appliance, Novell and Microsoft, according to Mendel.
Between the data center and the branch office is the WAN, and that is where IP traffic management vendors will play. Packeteer, Expand Networks and Peribit will be the main contenders, with technologies to optimize application delivery, compress data and ensure QoS. A fourth market, application-specific acceleration, will focus on application-specific pain points, such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes or packaged apps such as SAP and Siebel.
Lastly, Forrester says, acceleration management technologies will emerge, attempting to manage the overall acceleration architecture for enterprise IT managers. Still an immature area, Forrester says companies such as Interwoven, Macromedia, Telegenica and Network Appliance are working to provide the technology that eventually both infrastructure and content management vendors will try to address.
“All-encompassing solutions will be the ultimate goal,” Mendel says. “It will, however, be at least another 24 months before the vendors for server load balancing, IP traffic management and CDNs can bring mature offerings to market.”
