Cisco's Application Control Engine (ACE) is a switch that is typically deployed in front of server farms, where it attempts to improve the performance of the applications served by the farm through technologies including Layer 4 load balancing, Layer 7 content switching, server offload (SSL/TCP), and more. ACE is available in two primary flavors: The ACE Module, intended for use in the vendor's Catalyst 6500 series switches or 7600 series routers; or as a stand alone appliance (the ACE 4710 switch).

As mentioned, ACE attempts to improve overall application performance in multiple ways. Load balancing capabilities enable the product to monitor the health of connected servers and route traffic to the best available server, with content switching enabling packets to be routed based on their contained data attributes. Failover features are also included. While the switch/module fronts server farms in a data center, the vendor also offers the Cisco ACE Global Site Selector (GSS) which includes DNS services and thus enables load balancing on a global scale (amongst geographically distributed data centers).

In addition to availability features, the products also include technologies that collectively attempt to accelerate the response time of applications; including hardware-based compression, delta-encoding (sends only the data that has changed in HTML content between successive visits), "Flash Forward," and SSL & TCP caching and server offloading.

Other features include support for virtualization (each physical device can itself be virtualized into up to 250 isolated virtual switches); security features including DoS prevention and network & protocol-level packet inspection; and support for role-based security.

Performance wise, the ACE module provides up to 16 Gb/sec of throughput, while the ACE 4710 now offers up to 4 Gb/sec of throughput (2 Gb/sec w/compression) per 1U appliance. Both can be licensed based on the throughput needed, with the appliance offering licensing at 1, 2, and 4 Gb/sec and the module offering throughput of 4, 8, or 16 Gb/sec.

New in the latest release of the ACE platform is the aforementioned throughput improvement of the 4710 to up to 4 Gb/sec, as well as support for the SIP, RTSP, and RADIUS protocols. Other improvements include support for "Generic Protocol Parsing," which is the ability to configure switching policies based on any information in the traffic payload; and support for header manipulations including deleting, inserting, or re-writing HTTP headers.

The Cisco ACE product family is available now; with the new features described above due in the 3rd quarter of 2008.

Visit the Cisco Web site for further information.