Vendors line up tools to boost WAN performance

Blue Coat Systems and McData are launching new accelerator appliance systems to give firms better performance over wide area networks (WANs).

Content and application delivery specialist Blue Coat launches its Mach 5 technology to accelerate applications, this week.

Blue Coat international channels and marketing vice-president Nigel Hawthorn said, “Other companies accelerate everything – spam, viruses, etc. We come from an HTTP/ HTTPS background so we can look at the content and act accordingly.”

Mach 5 stands for Multi-protocol Accelerated Caching Hierarchy, and this hierarchy has five tiers, according to Hawthorn: bandwidth management, protocol optimisation, object cacheing, byte cacheing and compression.

Mach 5 will ship with Blue Coat’s upgraded SGOS version 5 operating system running ProxySG appliances, and will be able to accelerate Cifs, Mapi, RTSP, MMS and SSL protocols.

Meanwhile, storage area network (SAN) switch vendor McData has teamed up with application acceleration vendor Riverbed and network storage vendor FalconStor to offer firms remote office consolidation (ROC) systems with accelerator appliances for the SAN.

McData’s ROC system uses re-branded Riverbed Steelhead appliances, called SpectraNet WDS Accelerators, to consolidate remote office data and infrastructure to the datacentre. The first device from the partnership with FalconStor will be the SpectraNet Replicator for Exchange (SRE), which uses FalconStor’s IPStor software replication utilities for an integrated data recovery system in McData’s ROC.

Blue Coat’s appliances are priced from £2,000 + VAT for an SG200 branch office appliance. Mach 5 is a free upgrade and is scheduled to be generally available in April.