Cisco Systems Inc has made an equity investment in San Mateo, California-based Persistence Software Inc as part of a deal that will see the company license the new Persistence PowerTier application server as a strategic technology component for its next generation of network service and network management products. Once best-known for its object-relational mapping techhology, Persistence has more recently been calling itself the web scalability company and introducing products that take advantage of its data caching software. PowerTier is said to accelerate standard web and client-server applications by factors of 10 to over 100 times. It also incorporates what Persistence calls parallel application processing software, which boosts the performance of software reliant on back-end relational databases, and intelligent agents for real-time notification of critical events. Users include JP Morgan, Federal Express and Xerox Corp. According to Cisco it will use the application-level caching technology to speed up the configuration of routers and switches throughout large networks by using the technology in its Cisco IOS network management software. Bandwidth and time is saved using the technology because rather than having to pass every user request over the network to the back-end database, the PowerTier server manages frequently accessed data in memory, thereby satisfying the majority of user information requests at in-memory speeds. No financial details of the deal were given. As a separate product, PowerTier 2.0 is available from next month, priced at $8,000 per develop, with deployment licenses starting at $10,000.
