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The First IPv6 WAN Optimizer: Speed At What Price?: Page 3 of 3

Blue Coat deserves kudos for pushing the market and delivering a WAN optimizer suitable for the IP protocol of the future. With the depletion of the IPv4 addresses, the MACH5 is bound to gain some attention.

What's less clear, though, is the market need for a IPv6 WAN optimizer among enterprises. While government institutions have adopted IPv6, leading consultancies such as the Gartner Group are recommending that organizations do not migrate their desktops to IPv6 until sometime next year.

Then there's the question of pricing. Blue Coat did not offer pricing at press time nor specifics on the scalability of the MACH5. Those are key points. The MACH5 will track every session running through the connection and have to maintain state information about those sessions, which will require sufficient memory and disk resources. The scalability of the box and, by extension, of the price of the box should then become significant factors for consideration.

UPDATE: Since publication, Blue Coat has confirmed that the MACH5 starts at $2,995 U.S. list and tops out at $87,000. The company would not disclose specifics related to scaling, saying only that "Blue Coat's product management team have stopped compiling connection count numbers since there are so many variables and it can vary widely from instance to instance." Nor would BlueCoat disclose throughput numbers. Personally, while I appreciate the complexity of the problem, I think that IT managers deserve some guidance around the capacity of these appliances.