Ecessa Launches Secure WAN Link Controllers with Integrated Firewall and VPN GatewayNew Shield

Plymouth, MN -March 10, 2009 – Ecessa (formerly Astrocom), a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME), has announced its new product family of affordable WAN Link Controllers that brings greater security and WAN link control to the SME market. The new ShieldLink family includes a built-in firewall and Virtual Private Network (VPN) gateway along with increased flexibility in defining access control. These features are integrated in one network device to provide SMEs with greater functionality and reliability to manage Internet traffic and maintain websites more effectively without the high costs of other WAN offerings.

By providing more integrated features targeting security, businesses save costs on implementing, managing and maintaining several new networking products, while maximizing secure and reliable 100% Internet traffic uptime. With the integrated VPN gateway feature, ShieldLink creates virtual tunnels that enable secure communications between sites by encrypting user traffic over the Internet using the strong security of IPsec. The VPN capability also provides flexibility in securing communications between remote telecommuters and the main office, regardless of location.

ShieldLink’s integrated firewall enhances access to networks with new security feature sets, and increased flexibility in defining access control. ShieldLink defines three classes (WANs, DMZ and LANs) of network interfaces for handling various network traffic zones. Preventing network intrusion to private networks by inspecting traffic passing through it (both inbound and outbound), ShieldLink regulates the flow of traffic within determined zones. For example, the Internet is a zone with no trust, while the LAN is a zone with higher trust. A demilitarized zone (DMZ), located between the Internet and the LAN, is an intermediate level of trust.

“Ecessa has always been focused on the SME market, with a clear understanding of these specific customers’ business and IT requirements for managing their WAN infrastructure,” states Ron Thomas, president and CEO of Ecessa. “ShieldLink is the most recent example of how Ecessa continues to offer many enterprise-class features at a price point affordable to the SME market. This is extremely important when IT departments are looking to do more with less cost and resources.”

Other ShieldLink capabilities include intelligently and efficiently distributing traffic among multiple, diverse network links and link aggregation (multi-homing); automated inbound and outbound load balancing and failover; site failover and fallback, redundancy, and traffic shaping. ShieldLink allocates Internet traffic across several links and uses bandwidth aggregation to maintain several links separately. With the ShieldLink channel bonding feature, multiple and diverse WAN links (i.e. cable, xDSL, T1, wireless, etc.) are combined into one large network connection to provide greater available bandwidth and reliability for large file transfers. Additionally, ShieldLink provides IT administrators with greater control, by allowing them to easily adapt to network changes based on an optimization layer within the WAN.

ShieldLink is available immediately in several configurations: 100, 250 for single sites and 55, 200, 250EHQ for multiple sites. ShieldLink can be purchased as a stand-alone secure WAN link controller, or as an add-on (software/firmware) module for existing Ecessa PowerLink products.

About Ecessa

Ecessa (formerly Astrocom) is a leader in affordable WAN link controllers for WAN and ISP link aggregation, automated load balancing, failover and network security tailored to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized enterprises (SME) that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical application delivery. Ecessa helps SMEs rapidly grow their business with 24/7 network high-availability, optimized WAN performance, flexible scalability and secure access – while streamlining IT costs.

At one-third the cost of other competing products, Ecessa’s PowerLink and ShieldLink deliver industry leading price/performance value. Ecessa optimizes WAN traffic for organizations of all types who wish to improve network and application performance and eliminate downtime for business-critical, time-sensitive applications.

Ecessa uses multi-homing to connect a single LAN or WAN to multiple ISPs; enables quality-of-service (QoS) to prioritize network traffic that ensures the best possible bandwidth is always available to applications, especially during periods of congestion; and uses link load balancing and automatic failover to direct traffic to WAN links with the optimum bandwidth and cost-efficiencies.

Over 6,000 companies rely on Ecessa to cost-effectively ensure that each application has the appropriate Internet bandwidth and availability needed to support user and business requirements. The company is headquartered in Plymouth, MN. For more information, visit www.ecessa.com, or call us at 1-800-669-6242.

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With 12 websites and more than 760 million page views a month, Neogen relies on Crescendo’s AppBeat™ DC to optimize Web performance

“Before deploying AppBeat DC, our user growth was causing our sites to load very slowly. In addition, we were having redundancy problems whenever a Web server went down,” said Zoltan Farczadi, CTO at Neogen. “Since deploying the AppBeat DC product our page load times have improved dramatically. We’ve gone from a slow/very slow rating in Alexa, to fast/very fast. And more importantly, our customers are experiencing lighting-speed load times for pages and content.”

Neogen is one of Romania’s leading online portals. The company offers searching and matching services for a variety of verticals including employment, home, automotive, social networking and more. Last month, the company received more than 760 million total page views across 12 sites, with an average load time of less than one second for www.Neogen.ro.

“AppBeat DC really allows us to offload some of the processing-intensive tasks from our Web servers, and optimizes and accelerates the delivery of the content to our end-users. When we first tested the solution, the performance was fantastic, and it also fit into our existing architecture, without making any significant modifications. We’ve been very happy with the solution and it’s worked just as we’d expected,” added Farczadi.

Crescendo Networks, the Crescendo Networks Logo and AppBeat are trademarks or registered trademarks of Crescendo Networks in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

You can take a look at it this week at: http://www.radware.com/virtualpressconference.

First up is news from A10 Networks, and they report that they’ve recieved $23 million in Series C funding.  Details are here.

F5 released their new blade-chassis box, the VIPRION, a few weeks ago. The VIPRION boasts 36 GBits of Layer 7 traffic and 200,000 SSL TPS. Lori Mac Vittie does an un-boxing of it on F5′s devcentral.

The gist of it is that the LoadMaster becomes Layer 7-aware of the Windows terminal session, analogous to cookie persistence for HTTP.

Here’s the official KEMP press release:

KEMP Technologies Offers Full Support for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services – Significantly Enhancing its Line of Load Balancers

Support for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services provides an efficient way to both load balance and maintain a persistent connection

Medford, N.Y. – February 6, 2008 – KEMP Technologies, a leading provider of affordable server load balancing and SSL acceleration solutions, today announced a significant upgrade to its LoadMaster line, by offering full support for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services (WTS). With the addition of WTS, KEMP delivers a solution that helps organizations best maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of their networks, at an SMB-affordable price point.

When KEMPs LoadMaster products are WTS enabled, users are able to maintain persistence as well as perform resource monitoring for Window servers running multiple services. The LoadMaster resource monitoring feature offers useful data on both memory and CPU, ensuring users experience the most efficient load balancing possible on each server. KEMP is also now able to integrate seamlessly with MS Session Directory – providing a more reliable re-connect when a server is disconnected.

The LoadMaster’s Layer 7 session-based persistence facilitates client session reconnect, which can be enabled without any requirement for the MS Session Directory Service to be installed. Of course, in environments with Microsoft’s Session Directory is already deployed, the LoadMaster will integrate seamlessly.

“We saw a considerable need for the market to have a high functioning load balancer along with the added benefit of full Terminal Services support,” said Kevin Mahon CEO and founder of KEMP Technologies. “While we are the leaders in providing an affordable load balancer, we also know it is crucial to recognize our user’s needs and provide the most advanced technologies seen in the market. With the addition of this new value-added services, we are doing both.”

Additional benefits of WTS include service checking for servers running Microsoft SQL, and extended capabilities for the increasing segment of remote workers. The KEMP product line currently includes three models, the LoadMaster 1500, LoadMaster 2500 and LoadMaster 3500 – all three models now come WTS enabled, and include a comprehensive first year warranty and technical support agreement.

About KEMP Technologies

KEMP Technologies is a leader in providing affordable load balancing to the small and medium sized Internet transaction-based businesses. Every KEMP LoadMaster includes Layer 4-7 content switching, content management, and SSL acceleration – regardless of the product price. The KEMP Technologies product line is able to ensure the SMB has a high functioning load balancer without the need of a fully-staffed IT department.