Web gear aimed at corporate networks

NEW YORK - With service provider markets in the dumps and most dot-coms a distant memory, vendors will be looking to pitch their Web and content-networking wares to corporate customers at Internet World 2001 this week.

F5 Networks, Radware, CacheFlow and Network Appliance will have new products that could help increase the speed and security of Web traffic, streaming media and content networking for large companies.

F5 will have an updated version of its Edge-FX Cache, which can now act as a content-delivery device, along with improved security and management features. The appliance sits in a data center in front of Web servers, acting as a Web cache for static pages. The box could also sit at an enterprise branch office, acting as a content-delivery device, and a local Web cache for intranet users.

New features include hardware-based Secure Sockets Layer encryption, allowing the appliance to handle 10 times more SSL connections than previous versions, which relied on software-based SSL processing. A Distributed Edge Management feature allows an administrator to reconfigure a single Edge-FX, and have the changes replicated to other Edge-FX caches in a geographically dispersed organization.

The change of focus to enterprise organizations by Web gear makers could be seen as last-resort marketing, analysts say.

"There's no business left with the dot-coms, so what else are you going to do but move and refocus on the enterprise?" says Peter Firstbrook, an analyst with Meta Group. "At the same time, the enterprise is moving up to the dot-com scale in terms of Internet activity. All of that was formally done by the Amazons of the world, and now the GMs and the Toyotas and United Airlines are moving into that and could be considered as having high scalability requirements."

Even with that, some enterprise users who have Web caching and acceleration gear are waiting on new Web gear and content delivery network (CDN) purchases.

"A lot of what we've proposed has been cut back," in terms of new IT projects, says Brian Terry, vice president of IT at People's Bank in Bridegport, Conn. People's Bank uses F5's Big IP server load-balancing product, but he will probably pass on the vendor's new CDN/caching appliance because content networking is not in his company's plans or budget.

Web gear vendors will be looking to break down such resistance at Internet World.

CacheFlow will announce a new feature set for its cIQ Content Delivery family of products that will let enterprise customers better manage and distribute streaming content to caching servers in a network. CacheFlow is specifically targeting content that is broadcast on a schedule.

With the new features, CacheFlow users will be able to operate broadcasts, where content is shown at 9 a.m. EST and again at 9 a.m. PST. Using the cIQ Director product, network administrators could push the content to caching servers on the West Coast before the scheduled broadcast, allowing West Coast users to grab a local copy of the content, rather than going across a slower WAN connection and hitting an overloaded origin server.

Radware will introduce its Peer Director appliance for helping large organizations and service providers better control their Internet routers. The box can be used in networks with connections to multiple ISPs ("multihomed" networks) to provide traffic management and enforce network access rules for multiple Internet links.

Network Appliance will debut a Camera-to-Viewer initiative, which certifies that products and services from certain partners will work together when creating streaming media content. The drive behind Camera-to-Viewer is to create a blueprint for content delivery that involves creating, editing, publishing and serving content to users.