A new data center product being introduced today by Crossbeam Systems Inc. (www.crossbeamsystems.com) is among the first of a new group of devices coming to market that will address both networking and applications hosting in a single platform, according to vice president of marketing Throop Wilder.
“When ISPs came out and vendors started addressing them there was a convergence of LAN and WAN technology,” says Wilder. “Then it was tough to get experienced staff in both LAN and WAN. Now we’re getting convergence of networking and applications. That’s new, and it’s very unusual. We’re about to enter a new technology wave as these new products [are introduced].”
Crossbeam’s X40 Network Applications Concentrator has all the benefits of a server and an appliance, says Wilder. The Linux-based product sits behind routers and switches in a data center to host and provide load balancing for applications such as firewalls, intrusion detection, virus scanning, VPN, denial of service attack prevention and a range of content delivery services. Crossbeam is partnering with independent software providers for the actual application software. To date it has announced only one such deal, with Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com), for its VPN-1/FireWall-1 application software to run on the X40 platform.
“The way people solve the equipment infrastructure at this layer today is really convoluted,” Wilder explains. “You would not believe the hairballs that are built today.” For example, one potential Crossbeam customer today uses 10 servers and four load balancers just to support a firewall application, he says. And if that customer wanted to add an additional application, the customer would have to replicate that complex group of networking elements. The X40, however, can support multiple applications on a single, blade-based platform.
“We look deep into packet and make a load balancing decision about what blade to send that traffic to,” he says. “So you get a factor of 10 savings with us and more flexibility. You can start out with one networking blade, four application processing blades and a support blade [or whatever number of blades based on need] and scale up as your network grows. We take probably a tenth or less of the power draw vs. the sandwich architecture.”
The X40 can support from 400mbs to 10gbs capacity, offers five 9s availability and can be AC- or DC-powered. Slated for availability in December, entry pricing for the X40 is $65,000.
