When Warp Technology Holdings announced its intention to acquire SpiderSoftware late last year, it talked about how Warp wanted to expand beyond its application-acceleration appliances - geared for large companies - with lower-priced software geared for small companies.

It's making good on that promise, and this week plans to release a new version of SpiderSoftware's SpiderCache, now called Warp SpiderCache. The software supports dynamic and static Web content, and the company says it makes servers perform 10 to 40 times faster by offloading requests from origin servers.

The biggest enhancement to Warp SpiderCache v3, according to the company, is a distributed architecture that gives customers flexibility in how they set up their Web infrastructure. The software includes a Central Manager module, which has a console to manage how content is cached and distributed. The SpiderCache Source Manager is installed on origin Web servers and provides access to source files, as well as to partially cached content, the company says.

The caching software is also updated with advanced security and personalization features so that users can restrict who has permission to clear cached content, for example. In addition, the Central Manager enables users to set up caching across a group of servers or virtual hosts.
 
The software includes Web server plug-ins for Microsoft Internet Information Server on Windows NT and Windows 2000, as well as for Apache servers on Solaris or Linux.

Warp SpiderCache v3 starts at $4,000 for the professional version. The enterprise version, which includes additional functionality such as caching of static content to RAM and fully distributed clustering capabilities, starts at $15,000.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.