Juniper this week is unveiling WAN application acceleration appliances it says deliver more performance for the money than earlier models.

The WXC 1800, 2600 and 3400 appliances are designed to deliver consistent application response across the WAN, providing more LAN-like experience for branch office users accessing centralized applications.

The devices compete with Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) systems, Riverbed's wide area data services (WDS) products, and devices from Blue Coat, Ipanema and others.

Juniper's new hardware delivers higher disk capacities and performance in a smaller form factor than existing WXC appliances, the company says.

The appliances allow businesses to accelerate high volumes of traffic across a range of applications, including TCP, UDP, MAPI, CIFS and HTTP/S. They deliver functionality such as QoS, content distribution and policy-based multipath along with an integrated configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting application, Juniper says.

The WXC platforms recognize and eliminate redundant transmissions, accelerate TCP and application-specific protocols, prioritize and allocate access to bandwidth and help ensure high application availability at sites with multiple WAN links.

On-board hard drives provide support for Network Sequence Caching, which enables the devices to store repeated data patterns, and can produce as much as a 100-fold increase in effective WAN capacity, Juniper says.

The WXC 1800 can accelerate WAN traffic up to 2Mbps, typically at small to medium branch offices. The WXC 2600, designed for use at medium to large branch offices and small data centers, can accelerate traffic up to 8Mbps, and the 3400, for use at remote locations, head offices or data centers that require higher speeds, can speed WAN traffic up to 45 Mbps.

The list price starts at US$4,895 for the WXC 1800, which supports as many as 10 connections; $12,395 for the WXC 2600, with support for as many as 20 connections; and $24,995 for the WXC 3400, with support for as many as 140 connections.