AT THE NetWorld+Interop 2001 conference this week in Las Vegas, Web acceleration devices and performance monitoring tools will grab the spotlight for pledged capability to streamline costs and operations.

The recent sharp drop in the economic climate has altered enterprise infrastructure purchasing habits, said Peter Christy, an analyst at Jupiter Research in Los Altos, Calif.

"The change in the last year is that a lot of companies who were doing things in a foolish way ... are now refocusing," Christy said.

Devices designed to speed enterprise Web content, coupled with the trickle-down promise of lowering costs and extracting more value from servers and network pipes, will be making plenty of noise at N+I.

"This kind of technology allows you to get more out of your infrastructure -- you can extend it and get more out of the network," Christy said.

Making its mark at the show, Chutney Technologies will introduce its Chutney PreLoader Version 3.0, a content acceleration device designed to cache and deliver dynamic page components used to create personalized Web content. New features aimed at boosting performance and scalability for large enterprise deployments include Hot Failover, which builds a synchronized copy of data for ensuring availability, and Prioritized Caching, which allows enterprises to prioritize cache resources for specific users or groups.

"Deploying [Chutney PreLoader] can eliminate hardware purchases for a period of time by allowing a site to scale to a higher number of users without buying more infrastructure," said Greg Govatos, vice president of marketing at Chutney in Atlanta.

Also on hand at the show, F5 Networks will unveil the Big-IP Controller 4.0, a traffic management device featuring enhancements designed to reduce cost of ownership for Internet infrastructure. The OneConnect Content Switching feature increases the capacity of back-end servers, which lowers bandwidth costs, according to officials at F5 in Seattle.

People's Bank, in Bridgeport, Conn., uses the Big-IP Controller to maintain application uptime. Brian Terry, vice president of IT at People's Bank, said the economic slowdown led to scrutiny of purchases. "We are looking a lot closer at prospective purchases to make sure the ROI is there before we go out and buy something, and we are more focused on being able to leverage what we already have," he said.

Web performance management will also gather momentum at N+I as vendors such as Keynote Systems and Compuware introduce services and tools for boosting network availability and reliability.

Keynote Systems, in San Mateo, Calif., will unveil Enterprise Perspective, which tracks performance of extranets and VPNs so managers can react to bottlenecks. Compuware will announce EcoSystems 2.0, performance management software created to help organizations meet service-level requirements and reduce application downtime. One Compuware customer, the Detroit Medical Center, uses EcoSystems to monitor availability of critical applications, such as electronic medical records. "These tools have significantly improved our network diagnostic ability," said Don Ragan, senior vice president and CIO of Detroit Medical Center.

InfoWorld

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