Allot Communications Ltd. unveiled a new quality-of-service appliance at NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas last month. Allot said the offering will make it possible for corporate users to boost application performance over multiple WAN links. The NetEnforcer AC-802 device doubles the throughput of the company’s former top-shelf QoS appliance, the AC-701, to 310Mbps.The gear sits between the WAN router and the LAN, and enforces QoS rules on traffic. It can monitor traffic at any network layer and report on top users, bandwidth utilized, bandwidth consumed per application and sites visited by Web browsers, among other metrics. AC-802 will be available this month. It costs US$40,000 to US$50,000, depending on model.
Expecting a spec
After years of foot-dragging by vendors, the storage industry is finally coming together around an open storage management software interface that’s expected to reduce the complexity of managing multivendor SANs. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), which represents about 300 vendors, announced that it has published for public comment Version 1.0 of the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), a 350-page set of interface guidelines formerly known as Bluefin. SMI-S will provide storage management vendors with common application programming interfaces. The specification is expected to be finalized by October.
No Pavarotti – yet
Enterasys Networks Inc. said last month it is buying the intellectual property of failed Multi-protocol Label Switching startup Tenor Networks Inc., a move aimed at developing the routing expertise at the Cabletron Systems Inc. spinoff. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, also brings Tenor cofounder Leon Woo to Enterasys as executive vice-president of engineering. He will manage worldwide research and development. Tenor’s MPLS and IP routing technologies will be integrated into Enterasys’s line of enterprise routers, which compete with products from Cisco Systems Inc., Nortel Networks Corp. and Allied Telesyn International Corp.