Blue Coat Accelerates Cloud Performance

Blue Coat Systems, as part of an effort to improve the overall performance of cloud computing, has added a new CloudCaching Engine for its MACH5 WAN Optimization appliances.

Announced at the Interop conference, the basic idea is to cache as much of any given cloud computing service as possible so that it appears to be a local server resource to the average end user, according to Mark Urban, Blue Coat senior director of product marketing. For example, Blue Coat says the CloudCaching Engine would enable, on average, a 40x increase in performance of the Microsoft SharePoint Business Productivity Online service.

Urban says the CloudCaching Engine is based on asymmetric acceleration technology that Blue Coat developed to not only improve cloud computing performance over a wide area network, but to also allow IT organizations to attach policies to those services via the Blue Coat appliance.

The company also plans to make available a symmetric version of the appliance capable of supporting speeds of up to 45 megabits per second in private cloud computing environments.

This approach also means that IT organizations can now accelerate cloud computing performance without having to install WAN optimization platforms in the data center of the cloud computing provider, which is something that many cloud computing service providers would likely resist, said Urban.

Pricing for the Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliances, which can support both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, starts at $2,995.