WAN Optimization Vendors Woo Enterprise Customers With New Products
At this month’s Interop Las Vegas 2006 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.
The product is scheduled to ship this 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 midsize-to-large enterprises with high Web traffic or complex applications to deliver over the Internet.
The NetScaler 12000 switch, priced at $71,000, accelerates application delivery and is slated to be available at the end of May, according to the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company. The NetScaler 12000 switch 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.
Coyote Point also 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.
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.
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, Coyote Point will have shifted to a 100 percent channel model, said Jack Irving, vice president of sales at the San jose, calif.-based company. Currently, about 40 percent of Coyote Point’s sales go through partners, he said.
Paula Rooney contributed to this story.