F5’s BIG-IP

F5’s BIG-IP appliances perform load balancing, SSL offload, web acceleration, application security and access control for Layer 4-7 traffic. F5’s TMOS operating system is designed to enable users to scale and customize BIG-IP through APIs and scripting languages. BIG-IP appliances are available in a range of configurations and capacities, including VIPIRON hardware (pictured) that extends BIG-IP to a bladed configuration that scales on demand. VIPIRON features dual quad-core processors that support F5's Clustered Multiprocessing to form a virtual processing fabric designed to utilize all available CPU resources.

Radware’s Alteon ADC switches

Radware purchased Nortels’ Alteon application switching business in 2009. Radware’s Alteon ADC switches are designed to perform application aware traffic redirection, including content switching, session persistency, server health monitoring, denial-of-service mitigation and SYN flood protection. Alteon ADC also offers multi-site global server load balancing, SSL offloading, web compression, caching, HTTP multiplexing and TCP optimization. Radware claims its Alteon ADC switches can accelerate the response time of Microsoft SharePoint servers by 350% and reduce the servers’ CPU load by 40%. Radware also offers and range of other application acceleration appliances and devices.

Riverbed’s Steelhead

Riverbed’s Steelhead products come in a range of configurations – including virtual – depending on the size of the enterprise. They are designed to accelerate a range of applications, including file sharing, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, HTTP and HTTPS, Microsoft SQL and Oracle database, and disaster recovery using protocol-specific features. They are also designed to consolidate file, email, and application servers from remote branches; cut bandwidth usage by 60% to 95%; scale to hundreds of sites; and support tens of thousands of users on one device. Riverbed last week upgraded its software to better support video and satellite traffic.

Silver Peak Systems

Silver Peak Systems offers both physical and virtual appliances for WAN optimization. The NX series of physical appliances (the NX-1000 is pictured) scale from Mbps to Gbps of WAN capacity, depending on the size of the enterprise and number of applications to be supported. They are designed to optimize all IP traffic regardless of transport protocol and application software version, and to support real-time applications like VoIP, video and desktop virtualization, in addition to traditional file, email and web traffic. The data center-specific versions of the NX line scale from 50Mbps to 2.5Gbps, and from 64,000 certified connections to 256,000. The company recently unveiled pay-as-you-go WAN optimization and then a free version of its WAN optimization software for virtual environments.