Zeus Technology has upgraded its application delivery appliance to include support for Java, enabling IT staff to introduce more granular controls for network traffic.

Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager version 5.0 also includes full support for load balancing session initiation protocol (SIP) traffic, which is increasingly used in IP telephony. Support for real time streaming protocol and IPv6 has also been added.

"Traffic management has become very application-focussed and so what you need is an environment which can manage traffic accessing applications, inspect it and change it on-the-fly if necessary," said Zeus strategic accounts vice president, Steve Webb.

Zeus had used its Perl-like TrafficScript language to inspect traffic at ultra-fast network speeds, but communicating with databases or authentication services was more problematic, said Webb. By adding Java capabilities, TrafficScript can now call the thousands of Java libraries enterprises have, improving network administrators' ability to control network traffic, he added,

Webb pointed out that potentially Java libraries could perform multiple functions, such as 'watermarking' documents leaving firms' networks automatically. Since it runs on commodity hardware, any upgrades in processor core numbers or clock speeds, would lead to an instant 'speed bump' for firms deploying Zeus systems, he added.

Webb reported a typical cluster of two ZXTM systems can deliver over 5Gbit/s of application traffic, and throughput scales linearly as further nodes are added to the cluster.

Zeus supports Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD on hardware appliances, and the technology is available as virtual appliances for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 and Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2.