• What is the Alteon Application Accelerator?
• What is the difference between WAN acceleration and application acceleration?
• Is the Alteon Application Accelerator a branch/data center solution?
• Will the Alteon Application Accelerator accelerate Exchange?
• Will the Alteon Application Accelerator accelerate LCS/OCS?
• What will the Alteon Application Accelerator accelerate?
• What won’t the Alteon Application Accelerator accelerate?
• What is SSL?
• What is SSL acceleration?
• Why would you need a separate network appliance for SSL acceleration?
• What is SSL Connect – and why should I care?
• What is Connection Pooling?
• Why does the Alteon Application Accelerator have load balancing features? Wouldn’t a full featured layer 4-7 switch be more effective?
• Can the Alteon Application Accelerator be used stand-alone?
• What is Adaptive Compression?
• What is Delta Encoding?
• Browser cache offload with version control
• What are Profiles?

The Alteon Application Accelerator is a data center appliance that accelerates web based applications. The Alteon Application Accelerator is deployed next to or at least near the application server, and uses a variety of methods to both reduce the amount of traffic between clients and servers and reduce the processing that servers need to perform.

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WAN acceleration typically refers to symmetrical acceleration technologies where devices are placed on both ends o a WAN link to increase the performance of that link. Application acceleration usually refers to asymmetric approaches where only one device is used – an appliance installed near the application servers. This device will both reduce the amount of traffic that needs to be communicated and offload processing from the application servers to provide improved performance and the resulting CAPEX and OPEX savings.

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No, the Alteon Application Accelerator is an asymmetrical product – it is installed only in the data center near the application servers. The Alteon Application Accelerator takes advantage of capabilities commonly found in browsers and mobile devices such as Gzip compression and caches to improve application performance.

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Microsoft Exchange communicates with Microsoft Outlook with a proprietary RPC protocol called MAPI. Alteon Application Accelerator does not accelerate MAPI. However, email on a Microsoft Exchange server can also be accessed through a browser based interface called, OWA - Outlook Web Access. OWA’s performance is often criticized. The Alteon Application Accelerator can significantly improve the responsiveness of OWA.

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It may be possible to accelerate the portions of OCS that are web-based such file transfers and the IM client. The Alteon Application Accelerator will also improve the performance of the OCS servers by offloading SSL processing from those servers.

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The Alteon Application Accelerator will accelerate web-based application and HTTP file transfers– if you can see it in your browser, chances are it can be accelerated. The Alteon Application Accelerator will also improve the performance of any application that uses SSL by offloading SSL processing from the servers.

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The Alteon Application Accelerator only accelerates web-based applications – that is HTTP and HTTPS traffic, including web pages and web downloads. Other protocols are not supported. In addition, other than by server offloading, the Alteon Application Accelerator only accelerates outbound traffic – that is traffic from the server to a client.

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Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, e-mail, Internet faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers. The SSL protocol provides data encryption, server authentication, message integrity, and may also provide optional client-side authentication. SSL encryption uses digital certificates to generate a session key.

Support for SSL is built into most browsers and is the standard way to secure communications between a web servers and clients.

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SSL acceleration is a method of offloading the processor-intensive public key encryption algorithms involved in SSL transactions to a hardware accelerator. The hardware can be a cryptographic card in a server or it can be a separate network device such as the Alteon Application Accelerator.

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While SSL can be handled in software by standard web servers, it is processor-intensive. Offloading this processing to a specialized device frees the server to perform its primary task, handle transactions.

While SSL accelerator adapters can be added to servers, the cost of doing so is high, the solution does not scale well, and management of certificates on multiple devices can be difficult. A networked SSL accelerator provides a more scalable approach with less management overhead.

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SSL Connect enables end-to-end encryption. SSL Connect enables the Alteon Application Accelerator to set up an SSL connection to the backend servers, while at the same time terminating the SSL connection to the client. This provides the means for authenticating the backend server and securing the information that is exchanged also on this network segment. This technology, (also known as SSL Bridging) terminates a secured session from a client, performs acceleration and security functions on that traffic, then re-encrypts the traffic as it continues to the application server. Back-end encryption ensures that data is not transferred over the network in clear text – not even within your data center. In short, with back end encryption, the Alteon Application Accelerator maintains two SSL sessions: one with the client and one with the server.

Because a new SSL connection is established between the Alteon Application Accelerator and the backend server, a lighter encryption algorithm can be used on this more protected network segment in order to improve performance.

Furthermore, since the Alteon Application Accelerator acts as a client towards the backend server, the Alteon Application Accelerator will always try to reuse previously established SSL sessions. The SSL session reuse attempts are successful, since the backend server recognizes the Alteon Application Accelerator as a client that connects repeatedly. SSL session reuse between the Alteon Application Accelerator and the backend server helps in lowering the overhead involved in performing a full SSL handshake.

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Connection pooling enables the Alteon Application Accelerator to reuse the server side of a socket for a future client request. Sockets can be pooled and reused when either the client closes its end of the socket, or when a specific time frame with no traffic on the client socket has elapsed. This mechanism improves performance and enables the Alteon Application Accelerator to handle more connections for each second when SSL connect is enabled (for end-to-end encryption purposes).

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Load balancing of backend servers must be performed by the Alteon Application Accelerator when configured for end-to-end encryption, since the Alteon Application Switch will only see encrypted traffic. The available Alteon Application Accelerator load balancing metrics include a hash algorithm on the client source IP address, a round robin algorithm, or a real time measurement of which backend server currently has fewest open connections. Load balancing can also be used in combination with a health check mechanism to minimize the number of failed connections. The load balancing of backend servers can also be combined with cookie-based persistency or session-based persistency.

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Yes, the Alteon Application Accelerator can be deployed as a stand-alone appliance. However, in the typical network setup, an Alteon Application Accelerator requires support of an Alteon Application Switch or similar product for traffic redirection. For small, low-volume sites, however, the Alteon Application Accelerator can be use in stand-alone mode.

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Adaptive compression compresses a document if it takes less time to perform the compression than it takes to send the uncompressed document to the client. The Alteon Application Accelerator selects between 9 different levels of gzip compression based on time to compress, network latency and CPU load.

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Many acceleration products provide dynamic caching, taking care to send only objects that have changed rather than entire web pages. Delta encoding identifies the actual differences between web page objects at the byte level. Unlike dynamic caching, delta encoding technology only sends the raw changed data. This results in significant savings due to fewer packets crossing the network.

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The goal of caching is to place content as close to the client as possible. The Alteon Application Accelerator combines its own high-speed dynamic random access memory (DRAM) with the client’s browser to cache content. To ensure that the client cache is active, the Alteon Application Accelerator intelligently controls the browser-based cache by injecting the appropriate tags into HTTP traffic. To ensure that out-of-date content is never served up, the Alteon Application Accelerator tracks changes to the original content.

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Alteon Application Accelerator’s profiles take the guess work out of accelerating Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), Microsoft SharePoint and IBM® WebSphere. These profiles were developed closely with Microsoft and with IBM to ensure that Application Accelerator will work seamlessly with these leading applications.

Application profiles identify exactly which combination of acceleration techniques should be used for each object type for a specific application. Application profiles can be added easily, customized and shared among Alteon Application Accelerators without code updates or system downtime.

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