Cisco unveils ACE app acceleration blade

Citing an epidemic of “fat and chatty” enterprise applications from Oracle, SAP, Siebel, and others, Cisco Systems on Monday unveiled a new product called ACE (Application Control Engine) and an update to its FineGround AVS (Application Velocity System), which the company claims will make applications run faster and more securely.

ACE — a multifunction blade for the Catalyst 6500 platform — uses logical partitioning to create as many as 250 virtual instances of Cisco’s server load balancing, application delivery, and application firewall features. The news comes just ahead of next month’s Interop trade show in Las Vegas, where Cisco and its competitors will be talking up their application acceleration and application management plans.

Logical virtualization allows customers to partition ACEs by factors such as application, resources, or customer, said Sangeeta Anand, vice president of product marketing for application delivery at Cisco.

Better user-role management designed to work with the partitioning allows administrators to limit access to applications based on an individual’s job description, Anand said.

“There are so many groups involved in the rollout of any application,” Anand said, adding that user-role management gives administrators “visibility into who needs resources.”

The ACE blade for Catalyst is a much needed update to Cisco’s content switching product line, said Joel Conover, an analyst at Current Analysis.

Cisco invested heavily in that market in the past, spending $5.7 billion to buy content switch maker ArrowPoint Communications in May 2000. Smaller companies such as F5, however, have driven innovation in areas such as application acceleration in recent years, whereas Cisco’s CSM (Content Switching Module) technology has languished, Conover said.

Rapid growth in Internet applications — as well as demand for more bandwidth, server capacity, and application security — has grabbed Cisco’s attention, driving new investment in content switching and application acceleration, Conover said.

The new ACE module will appeal mostly to existing CSM customers who need to upgrade. However, the virtualization and partitioning features will also appeal to large enterprises that need fast, high-performance app acceleration technology, Conover said.

Savvis, a global IT utility services provider, is one such company currently evaluating the ACE blade. The company has not been a CSM customer but does use Cisco’s Catalyst 6500s in its 25 datacenters worldwide, said Mike Tardif, vice president and general manager of global hosting services at Savvis. Integration with that platform plus the virtualization technology are a good fit for Savvis, which is investing in utility computing services, he said.

Cisco is sure to face competition from archrival Juniper and a host of smaller companies.

Juniper announced improvements to its DX Web-based application acceleration technology for datacenters in February and is planning more announcements around its WX WAN acceleration platform in May, said Mike Banic, director of product marketing at Juniper.

Smaller players, including Citrix, F5, and Foundry, are also likely to respond to the ACE announcement, experts said.