* Venation spruces up caching and content delivery software
U.K. software vendor Venation next month plans to update its caching and content delivery software.
Venation’s V-Web is expected to be announced at Microsoft Tech Ed 2004, and Venation says its newest release will support the latest products from Microsoft, which have yet to be announced. V-Web intelligently monitors Web usage across an organization and accelerates access to critical Web sites and applications by storing content closer to the user. V-Web 4.0 will add a feature than enables non-Web-based files to be compressed, cached and sent via the Web.
“We added capabilities to the software so now it can wrap any file as though it were Web-based and distribute it out to branch offices,” says Paul Green, Venation vice president of marketing. Also new in Version 4.0 is the ability to compress content on user browsers.
V-Web uses a combination of server and client software. Server software is installed on Windows Web server in the data center, and the client software is installed on the Web server in the branch office. The server component includes the software’s engine and rules database, while the client tracks what content is used most at branch offices.
Green says V-Web can learn patterns for the most popular content among end users and can automatically compress that content for speedier delivery. Network managers can also set policies and rules in the product to ensure specific content is compressed. The software automatically updates compressed content with any changes that have been made to it, and only sends the change information to end users to limit bandwidth consumption.
V-Web 4.0 performs proxy caching, and Venation also offers V-Serve software, currently in Version 1.1, which performs reverse caching. V-Serve sits in front of a corporate Web server and acts as a load balancer of sorts for heavily hit Web servers. V-Web and V-Serve can work independently of one another, but Venation says customers benefit more when they work in conjunction.
Pricing for V-Web 4.0 is about $5,000 per branch deployed.
