ISPCON Fall 2001 Preview Las Vegas

• Bring Your Appetite
• A Lot Of Upgrades From Allot
• Sun's Little Blue Friends

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 5, 2001]

Bring Your Appetite

Always wanted a taste of application deliver systems but couldn't find a vendor that served it the way you liked it? Bite into AppServe, delivered by Vobix from booth #2014.

According to Eric Paul, Vobix managed platform director, its ISP-to-ASP product produces a solid return on investment (ROI) with no risk.

"When I was running an ISP," salespeople would come to me and say, 'we have this $200,000 product and if you buy it here's how much money you'll make.' So I'd offer them some of that revenue stream if they'd give me that product for free," Paul said. "Nobody ever took me up on my offer."

Now, the former founder of Digicove Internet Services is on the other side of the fence and he's offering ISPs the the deal he always wanted to land. In return for a portion of revenues gained from Vobix's delivered application services, Vobix allows ISPs to deliver its products for free. The company will even help ISPs market Vobix's services.

The Vobix Managed Platform is based on Citrix's application delivery infrastructure. The following Microsoft products are including in Vobix's offer for ISPs: Access, Excel, Front Page, Outlook, PhotoDraw, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word.

Currently, Vobix serves applications out of its $4 million data center in Louisville, KY. The data center is connected to Sprint and UUNet networks. Vobix is making its official debut in ASP-ISP space at ISPCON Fall 2001.

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A Lot Of Upgrades From Allot
Allot is beefing up its policy-based Quality of Service (QoS) solutions with new software and hardware releases—featuring gigabit Ethernet compatibility and more—set to debut at ISPCON Fall 2001 in Las Vegas next week.

Allot's NetEnforcer classifies network traffic up to the application layer and enforces QoS policy to improve network performance. The NetEnforcer is managed via a browser or CLI (command line interface). The NetPolicy software product provides centralized QoS management (below). Additional software modules can be added to NetEnforcer to provide accounting, cache redirection, and load balancing.

Allot network diagram.

"What distinguishes us now is that we sell a dedicated fail-safe box that examines traffic on per-flow basis, unlike a generalist box," Levin said. "Generalists will offer some load balancing and some QoS, but Allot's products examine each packet and enforce detailed QoS, including traffic shaping as well as minimum and maximum bandwidth policies."

Allot was founded in December of 1996 and its product lineup has been evolving ever since then. Originally, Allot relied on using TOS byte (part of a standard TCP/IP byte) to shape and prioritize data traffic passing through Cisco equipment enabled for weighted fair queuing (WFQ).

Since the early days, Allot has added a Graphic User Interface (GUI) (right), increased throughput and number of concurrent users and policies supported, improved security, and initiated several other developments.

The third generation was made to handle peering protocols, provide classification for different business applications, authenticate HTTP, and prevent certain types of attacks. For example, a new feature can recognize a Denial of Service (DoS) attack by determining that the rate of connections is abnormally high, and when it recognizes a DoS attack, it drops the suspicious connections.

Allot's software is entering its fourth generation allowing further traffic prioritization by formulating definitions of different "pipes." This allows service providers to prioritize VoIP and video traffic by client. For example, A Gold level subscriber would be granted a Pipe of 5Mbps and a guaranteed minimum bandwidth for each video and VoIP session, while prioritizing other traffic.

The fourth generation of software also has built-in support for over-subscription and Gigabit adapter versions that work in copper 1000BaseT and fiber SX environments.

Allot's add-on software modules include NetAccountant, a robust database that is capable of monitoring traffic on a per-user basis, facilitating bandwidth-based billing systems.

All of Allot's hardware is Pentium-based, and its products use standard 20 GB and 30 GB hard drives. Its hardware starts at $3,500.

Allot will be at booth #3201 at ISPCON.

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Sun's Little Blue Friends
Members of the ISP-Webhosting List swear by the intriguing blue boxes known to rest of the world as Cobalt Raqs and Cobalt Qubes. Since Sun Microsystems, Inc. purchased it over a year ago, Cobalt's loyal following has been concerned that the products would be subsumed by Sun.

Fear no more.

The product lineup, officially dubbed Sun Cobalt, retained many of its original managers, its own Web site, and of course the distinctive blue product cases that make these items stand out in any reasonably well-lit network operation center (NOC). At ISPCON Fall 2001 from booth #2416, Sun Cobalt is is offering a sneak preview of a new product for fans of the blue box—the Sun Cobalt Control Station (SCCS).

The SCCS (left) allows Web hosts to manage multiple Sun Cobalt appliances from a single screen and over a single device. The SCCS is compatible with most—but not all—Sun Cobalt products.

Marc Tamres, Sun server appliance product line manager, said the SCCS has three key value propositions.

"First, it allows aggregated management," Tamres said. "Service providers can manage more Sun Cobalt products per technician, which is important as operations grow. Second, it allows group operations, for example allowing technicians to patch devices grouped by location, customer, or service."

"Third, it stores an inventory of Sun Cobalt devices, their characteristics, such as CPU, memory, and NIC cards, and also their software packages," Tamres concluded.

The SCCS can push non-Sun software packages—those designed by third-party vendors or home-brewed by ISPs—to Sun Cobalt devices. Tamres said that one beta tester of the unit used a backup script they wrote themselves.

"The SCCS can deploy it (the script) automatically," Tamres said. "The SCCS adds to the power of the script by allowing managers to monitor the script in the Control Station GUI."

The SCCS is based on a Cobalt RaQ 4R but has a 400 MHz chip, 512 MB of RAM, and two 40 GB hard drives. It is currently in beta testing and will be oficially released on November 20th. List price is set at $4,995.

SUN will exhibit at #2416 and MR1

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