Blue Coat is upgrading its Mach5 application acceleration architecture for its SG series of WAN optimisation appliances. This will allow more granular bandwidth management to improve quality of service (QoS).

Blue Coat vice-president Nigel Hawthorn said, “This gives IT managers the option to base prioritisation decisions on business processes rather than the normal recourse to servers and protocols.”

For instance, if users are running Oracle software to produce reports and process orders, precedence might be given to order processing at the end of the month. Priorities are assigned by physically tagging the traffic by setting appropriate Type of Service (ToS) bits in the network packets. This information can then be used by routers and switches that support Layer 3 QoS schemes such as Differentiated Services (DiffServ), which uses the IP ToS field to carry QoS information.

“This is important, because more applications are moving over to a web-based front-end, which makes it more difficult to prioritise on a packet-by-packet basis,” commented Hawthorn. He added that the Mach5 upgrade would be rolled out to Blue Coat’s customers over the next few weeks.

Just before the upgrade announcement, Blue Coat agreed to acquire Network Appliance’s NetCache business for $30m. Blue Coat will pay using part of its recently announced $43m private equity investment from Francisco Partners and Sequoia Capital.

NetCache’s appliances address internet security, web content and application acceleration and video delivery. Hawthorn said that the deal would close within 90 days and would add another 1,000 customers to Blue Coat’s business.

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