The feature is a default part of the upgrade to release 10.0 of the TrafficWorks software that runs on its SecureIron switches. They also have a spam filter and web application firewall, where again the competition is the likes of F5, Citrix, Radware and NetContinuum.
In the case of spam blocking, said Ron Mitra, product marketing manager for the SecureIron line at Santa Clara, California-based Foundry, the idea is for the customer to transfer any existing relationship with a spam blacklist provider such as SpamHaus, Websense or Surfcontrol from a dedicated appliance onto the Foundry box.
Sources in the optimization/acceleration market said Foundry has offered server load balancing for several years, having initially OEMed a device for this purpose from Redline, a vendor acquired by Juniper in 2005.
After that the relationship with Foundry presumably petered out, but Foundry were already developing something internally, so this is probably the result of that activity, said a source familiar with the sector.
Mitra clarified that optimization/acceleration falls by and large into two camps, namely the symmetrical technologies, i.e. ones which require product from the vendor at both ends, either two boxes or one box and a software client, to work, and asymmetrical ones, also known as one-arm implementations, in which a box at the headend suffices to work its magic.
HTTP acceleration, which is a Layer-7 technology also known as web acceleration, falls into the latter category, whereas optimization technologies that rely on disk-based on in-memory compression fall into the former, for example.
What Foundry is now delivering in the SecureIron firmware is thus a one-arm acceleration technology specifically for HTTP, but as Mitra put it, HTTP is also the most pervasive of all the L7 protocols.
As for whether Foundry might also be tempted to venture into symmetrical optimization/acceleration, which would entail putting a box into the branch office and/or remote data center to talk to a headend device, Mitra said the company is still evaluating the possibility. We don’t have a stance yet, he said.
Our View
Foundry CEO Bobby Johnson told Computer Business Review last year that while enhancements could be expected across the company’s entire portfolio as a matter of course, the SecureIron portfolio was where he expected to see real innovation, and clearly, with the addition of these security and performance-enhancing features, this is the kind of thing he was referring to.
Now, Foundry is still only a $500m company, dwarfed by networking giant Cisco, so these moves aren’t likely to result in a world takeover. Nonetheless, with Cisco itself offering optimization/acceleration as an add-on blade for its switches for which customers must pay separately, and with all the other players in the space offering standalone appliances, Foundry’s opening gambit is a challenging one.
For its existing SecureIron customer base on a maintenance contract, it’s a no-brainer, and if they have a couple of the devices, one can now be deployed to scan email traffic for spam while the other performs app firewalling and HTTP acceleration. For new customers, this at least puts Foundry in the running for the contract alongside all the established players in HTTP acceleration.
