Redline aims to rev up Web processing

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Redline Networks made a splash at ComNet 2002 with boasts that its new Web acceleration gear speeds downloads by up to 10 times and reduces the need to buy new servers as traffic increases.

Redline claims its T/X 2100 and 2400 Web acceleration appliances reduce the number of bits it takes to transmit a page by 50% to 74%, saving bandwidth and processing power. The devices also slash the number of TCP sessions Web servers have to handle, increasing server performance up to twentyfold, according to Sarah Stanwyck, Redline's vice president of marketing.

The devices are aimed at enterprise customers, but hosting providers or ISPs also could use them to reduce caching and increase performance.

Online comparison-shopping portal BizRate.com says a T/X 2400 compressed and optimized traffic in its server farm so much that it saved the company thousands of dollars per month on Internet-access bandwidth. It was enough to pay off the $20,000 T/X 2400 in two months, says Jody Mulkey, BizRate.com's vice president of data systems.

Former Dell employees came up with the idea for Redline after working on a project that pointed out, among other things, that setting up the multiple TCP sessions needed to download Web pages chews up processing power on servers. A separate device could relieve that.

In 2000 they won seed funding from former 3Com chief Robert Finocchio and Ken Oshman - the "O" in ROLM, the pioneering PBX company. Redline also landed $10 million from Advanced Technology Ventures.

The Campbell, Calif., company has a pack of competitors, including Packeteer, NetScaler and PictureIQ, says Peter Christy, an analyst with NetsEdge Research Group. These companies approach Web acceleration slightly differently, some using caching to offload servers.

Redline T/X devices don't cache, but efficiently retrieve Web pages from servers and optimize them to send to requesting PCs. T/Xs sit between Web farm load balancers and Web servers. The devices establish links between downstream devices requesting Web access and corporate Web servers. Without these devices, the requesting devices would make TCP connections directly with the Web servers, tying up the servers with multiple sessions per page.

With T/X devices, the servers download the pages to the T/X over a 100M bit/sec Ethernet link using a single TCP session. Once it has the page image, the T/X shrinks it using the type of compression supported by the requesting browser. It also weeds out data that the browser does not need to build the page. This process reduces the volume of data to be sent, requiring less Internet-access bandwidth.

Over time, as a Web site draws more hits, T/Xs can stave off the need to add more server hardware, again saving money in capital outlay and management.

"The more machines you have to administer and operate, the more your costs go up," Christy says.

The T/X 2400, which costs $20,000, supports up to 64 clusters of servers, with 32 servers in each cluster. A smaller version, T/X 2100, costs $10,000 and serves one cluster of 32 servers.