San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems Inc and Cupertino-based fellow Californian AirSoft Inc have announced a relationship under which they will provide a remote node accelerator for the former’s dial-up access servers, no matter what the type of wide area link. The agreement centres on AirSoft’s Powerburst software. With patents on it still pending, the company isn’t giving too much away about the technology, other than to say that it incorporates algorithms for eliminating redundancy, local cacheing and data pre-fetching, all of which will apparently accelerate a wide range of applications, including Windows system performance, file-system databases, electronic mail, and word processing products. It uses a 32-bit VxD-based architecture that takes up no real memory and is said to be fully compatible with all network security systems. Both IP and IPX protocols will be supported, added AirSoft. Under the proposed relationship, Cisco intends to provide Powerburst with its Remote Access Servers, with a view to increasing the performance of file system-based applications over remote node connections, be they via ISDN digital or basic telephone lines. The parties say they hope to gain significant improvement in performance, without any changes to the users’ existing applications or network environment. Pricing and availability of Cisco’s Remote Access Servers incorporating the Powerburst technology will not be announced until later this year, said the company.
