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Vendors Target WAN App Performance Management

Posted on: Saturday, 1 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

Three vendors are set to offer products that could help customers make better use of bandwidth to ensure better application performance.

Compuware upgraded its Vantage application performance management software with new features that report bandwidth consumption by application and user. Vantage software runs on a Windows server, and passive agents reside on client machines.

Company officials say Vantage 9.1 now can tell customers how much bandwidth critical applications, such as order processing, use. Network managers can use the information to prioritize applications and reallocate bandwidth. The Vantage suite monitors application performance across the network by measuring server response times, network latency and bandwidth utilization.

Compuware competes with Mercury Interactive, which also this year upgraded its tools to more closely monitor application performance (see related story page 35).

Vantage 9.1 is priced at about $25,000.

Meanwhile, Pivia Software also plans to tackle bandwidth consumption and network latency The company this week is set to announce its Pivia Performance Server (PPS) 4.0, software that now can track the performance of portal applications. The software can distinguish which application among the integrated applications in a portal is performing. PPS software is installed on a Linux server, typically in front of Web servers and in back of load balancers in a data center. If there is no load balancer, the box sits in front of a router and firewall.

The company also will unveil PPS Remote software that further speeds WAN delivery of applications to remote users. The remote edition will boost application performance over the WAN by up to tenfold, the company says. To achieve that performance, PPS Remote must be installed on a Linux server at remote locations.

With the remote edition, PPS watches application packets and caches and decaches them on either side of the connection. The company competes with similar offerings from FineGround Networks, Netscaler and Redline Networks.

PPS 4.0 costs $50,000 to start, and pricing for PPS Remote starts at $20,000.

ITWorx, with its NetCelera product line, is another company looking to optimize bandwidth. The company plans to add features to its data compression family the company says can further speed the delivery of data-intensive applications over WANs.

NetCelera, much like products from competitors Expand Networks and Peribit do, offers compression, bandwidth and TCP optimization tools.

The company in the next few weeks plans to add bandwidth management and quality-of-service features to its product suite. Those features will help customers guarantee that bandwidth not used for high-priority applications will be shared among other applications. The new features will control the maximum bandwidth used per application, essentially enforcing application service- level agreements.

The product suite also includes server software, NetCelera Enterprise Manager, which lets customers administer, configure and manage multiple appliances via a centralized console.

Pricing for the products range from $2,500 to $45,000, depending on the network.

Copyright Network World Inc. Apr 26, 2004

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