Radware unveils fast app switch

Radware last month unveiled Application Switch III, a device the company says can help Web services and IP applications to perform at their maximum potential.

Application Switch III delivers Radware’s SynApps security, availability and reliability services at multigigabit speeds. The switch has high port density and switching ASICs at the port level. The company says that provides high capacity and wirespeed switching over its 44G bit/sec nonblocking backplane. Radware offers a 10G bit/sec port in addition to Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet ports.

With this release, Radware introduces network processors for traffic forwarding, quality-of-service controls, real-time intrusion prevention and denial-of-service mitigation at multigigabit speeds, the company says.

Network processors provide the flexibility and programmability of a general-purpose CPU with the hardware performance of an ASIC. Their inclusion in Application Switch III offloads Layer 4-7 forwarding and packet processing from the CPU, resulting in greater performance, Radware says.

The last piece of the switch is the CPU, which performs health monitoring procedures at short intervals on networks. Once network health is verified, Application Switch III performs load balancing and traffic redirection. Radware says Application Switch III accelerates load balancing and traffic redirection by requiring the CPU to only make decisions once per connection, and then all further traffic forwarding operations are performed by the network processors.

Application Switch III is available immediately.