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Coyote Point Brings Next-Gen Networking to Life with Innovative Appliances

Posted by Frank Ohlhorst
April 14, 2012

Other vendors have offered similar capabilities for some time now. Although Coyote Point may be playing catch-up with an object-orientated management model, the company has made up for lost time by making it very clear and easy to understand via the drag-and-drop capabilities of the GUI.

One of the primary features offered by EQ/OS10 is the ability to quickly scale out servers and incorporate load-balancing technology to increase the efficiency of processes provided over a WAN (or even a LAN) connection. Again, that simplicity is powered by the new group/= object paradigms. Here, I was able to create server groups and deploy advanced traffic capabilities, such as HTTP multiplexing, which allows the re-use of server connections (commonly called TCP multiplexing).

That offers a significant improvement in performance for clients making multiple requests to a particular HTTP session. The device also works as a gateway to servers, allowing groupings of servers to be created using load-balancing algorithms to service requests and enabling administrators to improve application performance simply by adding new servers into the servicing group.

Coyote Point's EQ/OS10 operating system provides full support for 802.1Q-tagged VLANs, as well as untagged VLANs, while the GUI makes it easy to discover and/or define VLAN elements. I was particularly impressed with how VLAN elements could be defined using a drag-and-drop graphical interface, which simplifies the definition of virtual LANs. The visual reference made it much easier to quickly identify, define and control VLANs.

As expected, VLANs also support multinetting, which allows administrators to create multiple subnets under a single Layer 2 infrastructure. Although that feature is relatively common among WAN optimization type appliances, it is still notable because it allows administrators to define multiple Layer 3 networks on a single infrastructure setup.

Network administrators should find that deploying an EQ/OS10-based solution is relatively straightforward. All it takes is networking knowledge and a good understanding of WAN and LAN routing principles. It all starts with plugging in the device, which resides inline, between the servers and the WAN/LAN connections. The browser-based management console makes setting up the device straightforward, using setup wizards and extensive help files.

EQ/OS10 offers several features geared toward performance. Most notable are SSL offloading and HTTP compression, both of which have the ability to significantly speed traffic across the network and to reduce latency.

All things considered, Coyote Point's latest platform is ready to take on the big iron of the WAN optimization market and offers unique innovations and an ease of use that is second to none.

Coyote Point's appliances are available now.

E250GX - starts at $1,995

E350GX - starts at $6,495

E650GX - starts at $14,395

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