* Redline upgrade puts more functions in one box
Redline Networks this week upgraded its flagship software so that a single device can balance loads and cache, compress and accelerate Web application traffic.
“We have seen a collapse of the Web tier in many enterprise companies,” says Craig Stouffer, Redline vice president of marketing. “The old way of accelerating traffic required three or four boxes be installed in the data path. Today network managers want to consolidate the number of boxes.”
A recent Gartner report cited Redline as “the first vendor to target specific application environments.” The report goes on to say that Redline has a “solid vision of working with specific applications and enabling application service modules to support new applications.”
Redline, which delivers its platform software in appliances, introduced Version 3.3. In this latest release, Redline says it’s focusing on application availability, specifically in the Web tier.
One new feature, called Active-N, enables 64 Redline appliances to be connected and function as a single logical system. Redline says that the product architecture enables all connections to terminate on Redline boxes, which means Redline appliances boxes can offload server processing, and the servers don’t have to deal with packet retransmissions or slow clients.
Redline appliances are typically installed on a corporate LAN between a switch and/or server load balancer and Web servers. The products coordinate Web sessions between end users and the Web servers.
Redline appliances can now perform Secure Sockets Layer acceleration, compression and Layer 4-7 load balancing. Also new to Redline 3.3 is a reporting tool that provides visual snapshots of system statistics, graphically enabling network managers to see potential problems and pinpoint the causes. Redline can accelerate downloads of static and dynamic content, including HTML, SHTML, DHTML, JHTML, JavaScript and Java 2 Enterprise Edition.
The upgraded software is free to current customers, and all new features are expected to ship by month’s end. New customers can get started with Redline appliances for Web applications for between $10,000 and $50,000 per box, depending on desired features and network configuration.
