WAN Optimization Vendors Target Enterprise Market

Some WAN optimization vendors are angling to move upstream into larger accounts.

At this week’s Interop Las Vegas conference, Expand Networks, Citrix Systems and Coyote Point Systems launched new products designed to entice enterprise users with improved application performance over the WAN.

Expand Networks introduced Accelerator 7940, its latest data-center appliance for application acceleration. The device offers 45 Mbytes of throughput and supports up to 200 remote sites and up to 1,000 users, combining WAN optimization, compression, quality of service, application delivery and wide area file services capabilities.

“Resellers selling Cisco equipment can start offering this solution as part of a larger-scale server consolidation project,” said Ariel Shulman, vice president of product management at Roseland, N.J.-based Expand Networks. “When customers do server consolidation projects, the aggregate storage capacity that was scaled throughout the enterprise needs to be centralized.”

The Accelerator 7940 includes six hot-swappable 500-Gbyte drives for a total of 3 Tbytes of storage capacity, plus full RAID redundancy and dual power supplies. The product is scheduled to ship in the second quarter at a starting price of $24,995.Citrix, meanwhile, took the wraps off a high-end version of its NetScaler application switch designed for large Web sites and medium-to-large enterprises with high Web traffic or complex applications to deliver over the Internet.

The NetScaler 12000, priced at $71,000, accelerates application delivery and is slated to be available at the end of May through Citrix's authorized channel, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company said. The NetScaler 12000 includes a dual processor, dual SSL encryption chips and 4 Gbytes of memory, and it offers as much as 275,000 HTTP transactions per second. Faster performance is required because of increasing user volumes, growing use of dynamic content such as AJAX and XML, rising security threats and an escalating number of transactions requiring encryption, Citrix said.

Coyote Point is reaching higher up the customer ladder with the launch of its Equalizer Series E550si, a server load-balancing and application traffic management system that integrates HTTP compression, SSL acceleration, application firewall rule sets and SNMP network management capabilities into a 20-port Gigabit switch.

Coyote Point CEO and CTO Bill Kish positions the vendor’s wares as easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy and lower-cost alternatives to products from rivals such as Citrix and F5 Networks. “It costs three to four times less than Citrix or F5 to buy, with all of the features that 99 percent of the market needs,” Kish said.

The E550si is slated to ship in July at a starting price of $13,500. By that time, the company will have shifted to a 100-percent channel model, said Jack Irving, vice president of sales. Currently, about 40 percent of the Coyote Point’s sales go through partners, he said.Troy Shumaker, CTO and co-founder of Ecom Enterprises, a solution provider in Sunnyvale, Calif., said his company bundles Coyote Point’s products with its own Web development services. “We want our applications to perform well,” Shumaker said.

PAULA ROONEY contributed to this story.