Coyote Point Systems Inc., an application traffic management provider, this week will go after larger enterprises with a new high-end load balancer.

The San Jose, Calif.-based vendor, which has historically sold load balancers to small and midsize enterprises for about a quarter of the price of those offered by larger vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. or F5 Networks Inc., has moved its load balancing software to a Dell PowerEdge 1750 server platform to boost performance over its existing top-end load balancer.

"Now people are doing more complicated things using Simple Object Access Protocol. Rules are getting more complicated, so we needed higher bus speeds, more memory and greater CPU processing. Dell had a very cost effective, very high performance and robust hardware platform we could easily port our software to," said Bill Kish, Coyote Point president and chief technical officer in Millerton, N.Y.

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Coyote Point is targeting the new 1U form factor Equalizer Extreme at HPCC (high performance computing cluster) environments, enterprise data centers, and Internet and application service providers.

Whether it has the right channel partners to address those types of customers is a wait-and-see question, said Stan Schatt, vice president at Forrester Research, in Carlsbad, Calif.

Coyote Point is hoping that the Dell platform will give it a leg up among larger enterprises. "Dell is very strong in the enterprise space. By making our product available on a hardware platform enterprise users are comfortable with, it will be more attractive to them," said Kish.

Beta tester Bob Farrell believes that if Coyote Point can get its products in the door for evaluation by larger enterprises, the load balancers will sell themselves.

"Companies with bigger budgets may be apt to go with the Ciscos and Nortels, but they don't have to. If they get the product in the door, it's a home run," said Farrell, network manager at Student Universe Inc., an online student travel site in Watertown, Mass.

The new Equalizer Extreme allows users to create virtual clusters of servers. "You can segregate by content, by HTTP header information—you can put all audio and video on one set of servers. And our tools make it easy to build complex rule sets," said Kish.

The Equalizer Extreme exploits the Dell 1750 hardware to provide Hyper-Threading technology, which boosts performance for multithreaded applications by allowing multiple tasks to run concurrently.

It includes dual embedded Gigabit Ethernet interface cards for failover support as well as up to 8GB of SDRAM.

Coyote Point's optional Secure Sockets Layer accelerator card and Envoy geographic intelligent load balancing software also work with the new Equalizer Extreme.

It is due in July and is priced at $9,995.

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