At the heart of the technology from the Cambridge-based ISV is its Zeus Extensible Traffic Management (ZXTM) engine, which it delivers in a variety of formats: as appliances, software for bundling onto the customer’s server of choice, or as a virtual appliance based on VMware.
The deal with the Mountain View, California-based systems vendor means Zeus gets a major new route to market through the Sun channel, as well as the underpinning of a powerful hardware platform in the form of the CoolThreads servers that ship with Sun’s Chip Multithreading Technology.
The new offering represents an entirely new level of scalability and performance for traffic-management systems, with the combined Sun hardware and ZX software solution able to outperform most dedicated hardware appliances, while at the same time offering an unparalleled ability to manage application traffic – even XML – using traffic scripting, the two companies said.
Zeus Technology’s ZX application traffic management software directs incoming requests to the fastest server available and directs traffic away from slower or inactive servers, while dramatically increasing the number of users a server can support. Using software to load balance traffic across multiple servers makes it easy for enterprises to scale their applications, they said.
Thanks to ZXTM’s built-in redundancy features, users can access applications even in the event of a failure. Applications that are not designed for clustering can be scaled with session persistence, improving availability and response times, and application servers can be isolated from external networks, protecting the systems from external security threats, even including denial of service attacks and application-level hacking.
Our View
Sun may not be the market force it was through the change of millennium, but it still has a faithful customer base, and with a run rate in excess of $12bn this year, it is still a partner worth having for Zeus. Not only does this mean Zeus gets a lot of Sun partners selling ZXTM, but also associates its name with a major player whose technical prowess, if not its marketing know-how, is undeniable.
