Ashton Metzler & Associates Releases New Buyer's Guide for Selecting Application Delivery Solutions; Leading Analyst Outlines Product Selection Criteria, Covering Performance, QoS, Scalability, Transparency and Security Requirements.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Webtorials, a leading resource for IT educational material, announces the availability of "Buyer's Guide: Application Delivery Solutions." This new document, authored by industry veteran Jim Metzler, addresses the challenges associated with delivering applications across a distributed enterprise. Metzler, who is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, discusses the limitations of previous application acceleration solutions and highlights how a third generation of solutions has evolved to overcome today's application delivery challenges. He discusses key selection criteria for this new generation of application delivery products, highlighting specific features to examine prior to making a product selection.

"Buyers Guide: Application Delivery Solutions" is a "must read" for any IT manager looking to centralize branch office servers and storage. In addition to offering best practices advice for WAN acceleration from a leading industry analyst, it highlights key trends pertaining to application delivery and includes real-world perspectives from senior IT personnel.

"As more and more enterprises look to server centralization as a way of improving IT costs and ensuring corporate compliance and data security, the need to accelerate these distributed applications over the WAN has become increasingly strategic to business operations," said Jim Metzler. "New solutions have emerged to facilitate this trend, accelerating the performance of virtually all enterprise applications being delivered across a WAN. By understanding the impact that these products have on application performance, security, reliability and interoperability, IT managers can choose the solution that is best for their business environment."

Summary of Key Selection Criteria

According to the Buyer's Guide, the following are some of the main items that should be addressed in a strategic Application Delivery solution:

--Performance: A combination of compression and protocol acceleration techniques, coupled with newer technologies that increase data reduction, can deliver LAN-like performance.

--Quality of Service (QoS): Classification and enforcement of QoS enables enterprises to deploy a mix of applications to branch offices, including real-time traffic such as VoIP and interactive applications such as Citrix.

--Data Reduction: Significant benefits can be gained by delivering information from local data stores whenever possible. This minimizes the amount of information traversing the WAN and improves application response time.

--Scalability: The most scalable application delivery appliances are not limited by TCP flows and can support high bandwidth connections, including OC-3 in some instances.

--Transparency: For an application delivery solution to be truly strategic, it must optimize performance across all enterprise applications, independent of transport protocol (e.g., TCP and UDP).

--Security: Strong encryption is required to protect local data store on appliances, and secure information as it traverses the WAN.

A copy of the complete Buyer's Guide can be accessed at http://www.webtorials.com/main/resource/papers/silverpeak/paper3.htm. (Free registration is required.)