Application Acceleration

Array application acceleration combines fast packet processing with SSL acceleration, connection multiplexing, dynamic caching and adaptive compression to improve application response times by 5x or more.

Connection Multiplexing

Array APV Series appliances aggregate millions of TCP and HTTP connections into a smaller number of more efficient sessions to offload CPU-intensive connection management tasks from servers. APV appliances also minimize TCP and Web application inefficiencies and offload CPU-intensive connection management tasks to further improve end-user response times. For Web 2.0 applications that continuously open and close sessions to poll and access Web services, using APV appliances to offload connection management tasks from servers can reduce infrastructure costs by 50% or more while improving application performance.

HTTP Turbo

To achieve Layer 4 performance for Layer 7 traffic, APV Series appliances can be configured to operate in HTTP Turbo mode. HTTP Turbo parses initial Layer 7 requests and uses server load balancing to find and establish connections with appropriate servers. All further data and messages on Turbo client-server connections are then forwarded without parsing, functioning similar to Layer 4 connectivity with similar levels of performance.

SSL Acceleration

Processing SSL consumes massive amounts of server CPU, due to intensive bulk encryption and decryption, and can significantly impact end-user response times and the cost of scaling applications. APV Series appliances offload SSL bulk processing from servers, giving them the availability, efficiency and capacity to focus on serving content and applications.

Dynamic Caching

APV Series dynamic caching can accelerate applications 3x or more by freeing up server CPU cycles and preventing redundant data from being sent over the WAN. Array’s dynamic caching is completely compliant with the HTTP protocol and is optimized for small, hot content – making it ideal for delivering Web 2.0 applications. APV appliances can apply flexible rules and policies on requests and responses for efficient caching and can dramatically improve the efficiency of second level cache storage by combining caching and content switching.

Adaptive Compression

APV Series appliances act as a proxy, compressing data retrieved from servers to reduce the amount of non-essential data sent over the Internet. This efficiently utilizes bandwidth, accelerates applications and improves response times to end-users. APV appliances can be configured to intelligently choose compression algorithms based on the nature of the application, browser type and data patterns. Since applications commonly exchange data in file formats such as text, HTML, JavaScript, XML, PDF and Microsoft Office documents attached as MIME types, most benefit significantly from compression.

Traffic Shaping

APV Series appliances allow network managers to configure customized traffic shaping policies based on application, port and protocol information for prioritizing, controlling and rate limiting network traffic by traffic type: time sensitive traffic (VOIP, multi-media, streaming, video conferencing), best-effort (Web, IM, FTP) and unwanted (non-corporate, peer-to-peer). Array’s specialized traffic shaping enables rate-limiting of Layer 7 traffic on a per service basis for prioritized delivery of critical applications and enables bandwidth borrowing between application flows to handle spiky loads in a given flow. Prioritizing and classifying application traffic, IT can ensure guaranteed delivery of core business applications in addition to greater ROI through improved bandwidth utilization.