Redline seeks to boost intranets

Redline Networks this week will look to extend beyond its acceleration products for publicly accessible Web servers, with an offering for speeding up and securing intranets.

CAMPBELL, CALIF. – Redline Networks this week will look to extend beyond its acceleration products for publicly accessible Web servers, with an offering for speeding up and securing intranets.

The company’s new E/X 3250 Enterprise Web I/O Accelerator sits on a corporate LAN in front of Web servers, coordinating Web sessions between end users and the servers. By customizing traffic for the type of Web browser being used and multiplexing sessions to the Web servers, Redline says the product can reduce response times by as much as 90% and enable servers to handle up to five times as much traffic.

E/X 3250 is designed to convert HTTP traffic into secure HTTP, making it possible to secure a site via encryption without having to recode server content.

One customer, a major New York financial firm that asked not to be named, is using two layers of Redline gear to buffer servers running Lotus’ Web version of Notes. The Redline devices maintain Secure Sockets Layer encrypted sessions all the way from remote users to the servers, the user says.

Another customer, the state of New Mexico, uses Redline gear to speed up transactions between its motor vehicle department headquarters and about 75 branch offices.

The state turned to Redline after adding a Web application for handling automobile title transfers, which added traffic to the department’s frame relay WAN. Performance of the application was so poor that the department checked the bandwidth on its 56K bit/sec links to the branch offices and found that many were getting just 28K bit/sec, says Ed Ramos, CIO of the state’s taxation and revenue administration, which oversees the motor vehicle department.

He installed a Redline box in front of the Web server for the application and response time was cut by 70%, he says. “We got T-1 performance out of a 56K line,” he says.

Redline, which competes with vendors such as NetScaler, Packeteer and PictureIQ, makes another line of gear called the T/X designed for speeding access to public Web servers.

The E/X 3250 includes features the TX models lack. One is support for authenticating users through Windows NT LAN Manager, and denying machines that lack certificates from trusted certificate authorities. Another is called protocol scrubbing, which detects and corrects HTTP packet abnormalities, shielding Web servers from potential attacks that the abnormal packets might contain.

The E/X 3250 costs $30,000 and is available this week.