Stampede Technologies Introduces Advanced Virtual Pipelining for Browser Applications

May 15, 2007; 07:19 AM
Stampede® Technologies, Inc. (www.stampede.com), a leading provider of acceleration solutions for Web-enabled Enterprise Applications, today announced new acceleration technology called Advanced Virtual Pipelining™ (AVP) that improves the performance of today’s network-intensive applications by 40 percent over existing application delivery systems and WAN optimization controllers. Stampede’s AVP is ideal for accelerating interactive Web-based business applications that must communicate large and/or frequent amounts of data, and the new request-intensive Web 2.0/AJAX applications. AVP is possible because of Stampede’s industry leading, innovative client software for two-way application acceleration, and it becomes an important and standard acceleration technique used with the Stampede Application Acceleration Series™ family of solutions. Stampede will be introducing this and other technologies at Interop 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada, May 22-24 at booth #2175.

The Stampede Application Acceleration Series is a two-sided hardware/software acceleration solution for maximizing performance and bandwidth utilization of Web-based enterprise applications. The Stampede Application Acceleration Series employs performance-enhancing technologies such as TurboStreaming™ (for accelerating compressed or encrypted objects), SSL Client-side Termination (for accelerating SSL transactions), Intelligent Cache Differencing, Image Transformation, Connection Management and Load Balancing, providing significant performance enhancement. These optimization technologies support traditional HTTP/HTTPS, legacy TCP and the emerging Web 2.0/AJAX application environments. In addition, Stampede’s Acceleration On-Demand™ client technology is the only client technology to be automatically injected into the responses sent to the end user, without the need to install software at the client.

Advanced Virtual Pipelining is a highly optimized implementation of Stampede's patent pending TurboStreaming™ (multiplexed TCP sessions) that enables HTTP browser traffic to be intermixed across multiple "pipelines." All browser activity is optimized, including the network-intensive polling associated with Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. A key advantage of Stampede’s AVP client-side implementation is that communication resources can be shared across multiple applications, and all HTTP requests and responses from any application (including multiple browsers) are intermixed simultaneously across multiple concurrent sessions. Stampede’s AVP serves as a platform for the consolidation and aggregation of all Web-based traffic from a given client. Much as physical “link aggregation” uses multiple Ethernet network cables/ports in parallel to increase link speeds beyond the limits of any one single connection, AVP logically aggregates multiple HTTP protocol streams across a few TCP sessions. Individual objects or pieces of objects can be split into any size and then multiplexed with other object data and reconstructed as needed, which makes AVP ideal for converged enterprise networks and managed service networks that must deliver mixed payloads consisting of business-critical applications and data, streaming media, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and other network-intensive traffic. The end result is improved throughput and faster response time for the end user.

With normal HTTP sessions, a single request generates a response that must be transmitted completely before the connection can be used for other data. In addition, responses must be processed in the order that they were requested. Even if HTTP pipelining is used, there is usually a limit to how many requests can be outstanding, and separate browsers and applications cannot share sessions. This leads to poor use of bandwidth and users’ complaints about sluggish application performance. Many popular browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer do not support client-side pipelining as specified by HTTP 1.1. Of those that do, it is usually disabled by default because of various server interaction issues. When client-side pipelining is enabled, it is typically recommended that a client only pipeline up to two requests, so as not to overload servers and to aid in session recovery. Finally, a major restriction of the current HTTP 1.1 pipelining protocol is that a client may only pipeline "idempotent" or repetitive requests such as GET and HEAD HTTP requests.

Stampede’s AVP overcomes all of these obstacles by continuously allowing data to efficiently flow in any order over multiple TCP connections. The result is that all HTTP requests generated from a given client system are optimized with the benefit of improved response time even with lower bandwidth and fewer network resources being consumed. Stampede’s AVP implementation is also not restricted by the number of outstanding pipelined requests since the pipelining is performed between Stampede’s client software and the Stampede appliance.

In addition, since the HTTP multiplexing logic with AVP can re-sort objects dynamically "on the fly," there is no dependency on the order in which the objects are returned. In other words, a slower and possibly bigger object will not delay other requests.

Finally, unlike the HTTP 1.1 pipelining protocol that only supports GET and HEAD requests, with Stampede’s AVP, POST and PUT HTTP requests can also be "virtually" pipelined. Today, the ability to pipeline the POST HTTP command is vital because of the extensive use of this command with the AJAX model for Web 2.0 applications. Equally important is support for the HTTP Requester Object. The HTTP Requester Object is the basic request mechanism for AJAX applications. AVP fundamentally inherently supports both of these, thus allowing for highly optimized AJAX deployments in enterprise and managed service environments.

“With the implementation of Advanced Virtual Pipelining, Stampede once again demonstrates the inherent value of our client technology model,” said Gordon Dorworth, Stampede Technologies’ President and CEO. “We are able to deliver innovative acceleration solutions that directly benefit the user, and which cannot be accomplished with traditional solutions that require hardware devices in the remote locations.”

Availability

Advanced Virtual Pipelining will be available June 27, 2007, as part of the Stampede Application Acceleration Series Release 2. Pricing for the Stampede Application Acceleration Series Release starts at $40,000 for the first appliance, and $35 per client.

About Stampede Technologies, Inc.

Stampede Technologies is a pioneering innovator of Internet acceleration systems and enterprise network performance solutions. The new Stampede Application Acceleration Series™ combines Stampede’s decade of experience in accelerating network-intrusive IP-based applications with Stampede’s unique Acceleration On-Demand™ optimization injection technology and the ground-breaking Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series™ to dramatically elevate our customers’ online productivity and enhance how they use the Internet to communicate and interact with their employees, partners and customers. When your enterprise applications are operating at top speed, maximum performance and total business value, it’s a Stampede! For more information on Stampede Technologies, visit http://www.stampede.com.

Stampede is a registered trademark and Stampede Application Acceleration Series, Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series, Acceleration On-Demand, TurboStreaming and Advanced Virtual Pipelining are trademarks of Stampede Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.