Expand Networks adds ExpandView to Accelerator gear

Expand Networks last week announced a software add-on to its Accelerator gear that the company says enables users to build an intelligent, self-healing applications traffic management system.

ExpandView works with the company’s Accelerators WAN compression and acceleration appliances. The company says the software automatically discovers and classifies more than 100 enterprise applications while detecting performance problems relating to degraded WAN conditions. It also proactively fixes the problems for optimal application delivery across the network, Expand says.

“ExpandView is a great addition to Expand’s line of Accelerators,” Jim Kinter, director of IT for Exhibit Dynamics, an Expand customer, said in a statement. “The dashboard-like overview coupled with granular monitoring and comprehensive reporting capabilities will provide detailed insight on what’s going on in our corporate WAN, which will in turn enable us to make informed decisions regarding network resource allocation.”

The company goes on to say the software enables application prioritization and business alignment with IT infrastructure. The software is also used as the centralized management system to configure and administer distributed Accelerators.

Expand’s Accelerator gear is sold in pairs and sit at either end of a point-to-point WAN link to compress the data, thereby increasing the amount of data per second that can travel across the wire. It also can impose quality-of-service (QoS) policies on applications so those deemed most important get top priority and less important ones are blocked from hogging bandwidth.

With ExpandView, customers can set QoS policies centrally and have them distributed to the Accelerator machines rather than having to configure one Accelerator at a time. The software allows up to 64 policies to be set up for each box.

Features in ExpandView include:

* Automatic Application Discovery: ExpandView can automatically discover and classify hundreds of applications including SAP, Oracle, Siebel, Citrix and Microsoft Exchange running over a distributed enterprise network.

 * Proactive Problem Detection and Self-Healing: Application performance issues are quickly and easily detected and automatically resolved by the appliances when the WAN is determined to be the underlying cause of the slowdown.

* Detailed Reporting:  ExpandView enables organizations to collect, store and manage performance data.

ExpandView pricing begins at $5,000 for a single CPU system. ExpandView is immediately available for testing and will be generally available in January 2004.