Stories about: DX

A lot of solid-state disk (SSD) drive reviews and features have been circulating around the Internet lately, and I've noticed that the speeds of those products are increasing remarkably, even as manufacturers use more multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash memory in their products, which is innately slower than single-level cell (SLC) NAND.

Considering a WAN accelerator? Kevin Dunn, director of network operations at First Command, says these three features are must-haves. Read our case study on First Command's WAN acceleration project here.

First Command, a financial services firm with US$18.6 billion in managed assets and nearly 300,000 clients across the United States, saw the promise of the Internet as early as 1998. It quickly Web-enabled its core applications to support not only its own employees and individual customers, but also its far-flung network of financial advisors and their staffers.

Whether you call them application delivery controllers, application accelerators, application traffic managers, or just load balancers, the solutions for scaling out Web sites and improving the performance of Web applications have come a long way from their humble beginnings. The result is a great deal of choice in the marketplace, from bare-bones appliances with basic functionality to high-capacity switch-based systems that handle Web traffic in wildly sophisticated ways.

It's perhaps no small coincidence that Cisco makes a major announcement just days before Juniper does or hosts an important event. The day before Juniper unveiled its EX line of Ethernet enterprise switches last month, Cisco introduced its new data center switch, the Nexus 7000. This week was no different, as Cisco unveiled its next-generation ASR1000 edge routers just as Juniper held its annual analyst conference in Southern California. Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy stole some of Juniper CTO and founder Pradeep Sindhu's time at the conference to gauge his thoughts on Cisco's new router as well as a range of other topics.

Android is Google's foray into the handheld OS realm. It follows a path trodden by -- among others -- Symbian's Quartz, the SavaJe operating system, and J2ME. In fact, one of Android's stated goals is to overcome some of J2ME's shortcomings. Whether or not Android succeeds, either at that specific goal, or in general, remains to be seen.

Australian IT managers are facing serious network disruptions after Juniper announced its decision to end the life of the DX line of hardware, software and licenses.

Anyone interested in buying a Juniper DX application-acceleration box better do it soon, because the very last day to buy one is September 15, after which all models will be dropped from the product line.

Juniper Networks is discontinuing its DX line of application acceleration boxes that load balance, offload processing from Web servers and guard against denial-of-service attacks.