NAUTICUS COST EFFECTIVELY IMPROVES PERFORMANCE OF SSL AND LOAD BALANCING IN THE DATA CENTER.

Nauticus Networks, Inc., recently announced a powerful new line of application switches addressing critical data center requirements to effectively and securely deliver Internet-enabled applications. Based on the innovative Nauticus Architecture, the Nauticus Application Switch product line drives new efficiency in the delivery of essential application services including application switching, load balancing, and SSL, providing more than a 10x price/performance improvement over traditional solutions. Separately today, the company announced the successful close of its Series B funding, bringing the total financing to more than $33 million.

Based on the innovative Nauticus Architecture, the Nauticus Application Switches will provide dramatically improved, high-performance network, security, and content services in an integrated platform. Starting with a cost effective, two rack-unit system that can deliver multi-gigabit network throughput, the Nauticus Application Switches enable data center operators to significantly improve application delivery.

"We architected the Nauticus product line to optimize the delivery of network, security, and content services," said Josh Weiss, president and CEO of Nauticus Networks. "By applying a purpose-built architecture and critical hardware acceleration, we remove the traditional bottlenecks and create a platform for the efficient delivery of services. The result for data center operators is radically improved application delivery with a reduced cost structure."

Security is a leading concern in data centers today. The confidentiality of corporate information and business transactions is driving online privacy and security to the top of data center requirements. Providing authentication, encryption, and decryption, SSL (Secure Socket Layer) has been expensive to deploy and therefore, until now, has been restricted to only the most critical application areas. Nauticus delivers very high performance SSL cost effectively, enabling developers to blanket applications with encryption to ensure the protection of transactions, data, and the flow of information.

"Business-grade application delivery via Internet technology is quickly becoming a strategic cornerstone for enterprises. Gartner's clients involved in data center operations see an increasing need for devices integrating advanced networking and security services, such as application switching and high performance SSL," said Mark Fabbi, VP and research director at Gartner, Inc. "This trend towards highly intelligent, integrated networking infrastructure promises to make this market an exciting growth opportunity."

Application services in the data center have traditionally been delivered by a combination of appliances and switches. Traditional switches are high performance but have low functionality - these switches are optimized to move packets and not designed for higher layer services. Appliances provide high functionality but very low performance. The Nauticus Architecture merges the best of the appliance and switch capabilities without the drawbacks.

Through custom silicon and hardware-assisted processing - contrasted with a traditional software approach - Nauticus provides multi-gigabit wire speeds and policy processing, which improves the price/performance of services more than 10 times over traditional solutions.

Nauticus enables the cost effective deployment of higher layer services at very high connection rates with wire speed intelligence to provide services such as content rich switching with dense policy support. The Nauticus Architecture is also fully virtualizable, enabling a single physical Nauticus Application Switch to be logically partitioned into multiple "virtual switches" each capable of supporting a different application, department, tier, or customer.

The Nauticus Architecture solves key technical challenges in delivering cost effective application performance, while providing a platform to extend new services to the data center. The first Nauticus Application Switches will be in beta by mid-year 2002.