KEMP Technologies Bolsters its Application Delivery Controllers with New Data Optimization and Security Features

KEMP’s LoadMaster product family gains enhanced functionality, while still delivering affordable high-performance for small-to-medium sized businesses.

Yaphank, N.Y. – June 16, 2008 – KEMP Technologies, a leader in datacenter application delivery optimization for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB), today announced new advanced caching, compression and intrusion prevention system (IPS) features for the complete line of LoadMaster Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) and Server Load Balancers.

The LoadMaster product family is highly affordable, yet feature-packed. As with all of KEMP’s products, the caching, compression and IPS features are built-in at no additional cost. These new features continue KEMP’s advancements into the ADC marketplace, adding to the already feature-rich capabilities that include Layers 4/7 load balancing, content switching, IP and Cookie persistence, integrated ASIC-based SSL acceleration, and full layer 7 support for Microsoft Windows Terminal Services. KEMP Technologies continues to offer all of these enterprise-class features at a price point tailored for SMB businesses.

“KEMP is always improving their product line, continuously coming out with newer and better products,” said Sam Sandusky, CEO of Big Sur Technologies, a KEMP value-added reseller. “That makes it easy for us to talk to our customers about their products. KEMP seems to have a solution for our customers to address their application delivery needs.”

“Just like large enterprises; small-to-medium sized businesses want to run websites that are highly-available, fast, and secure. But their budgets for technology deployments are often limited.' notes Matthias Machowinski, Directing Analyst, for Enterprise Voice & Data at Infonetics Research. “KEMP's LoadMaster products allow SMBs to balance price and performance, by offering advanced features such as SSL offloading, and the new caching, compression and IPS features, at an affordable price point.”

“From day one KEMP has been focused on the SMB market. We have a clear understanding of their business needs, and the IT requirements for managing their web and application infrastructure,” states Kevin Mahon, president of KEMP. “Our main objective is to look at how we can continue to improve our product functionality, while maintaining the price/performance that SMB customers require.”

The LoadMaster support for application delivery services helps squeeze the most out of servers and network bandwidth, while providing increased security. The new features include:

Caching

The LoadMaster advanced caching engine saves valuable server processing, leaving greater server capacity to perform more critical core business logic. Significant server performance gains can be achieved when implementing caching. Chatty protocols such as HTTP and HTTPS require frequent creating and closing of connections, creating unnecessary resource utilization on servers. By deploying LoadMaster caching, organizations can greatly reduce traffic to their servers.

Data Compression

The LoadMaster data compression capability reduces the amount of data to be transferred for HTTP and HTTPS objects by leveraging GZIP compression available in all modern web browsers. GZIP compression reduces bandwidth utilization for protocols such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and lossless audio formats. By offloading this processor-intensive task from servers, data compression allows LoadMaster to compress the application payload within each packet, reducing network bandwidth consumption without degrading content quality. LoadMaster compression can reduce file sizes by as much as 75 percent. By reducing the time it takes to deliver requested content, the LoadMaster compression improves the ends-user’s overall experience.

The LoadMaster compression feature is fully integrated with LoadMaster caching to optimize content delivery by performing compression in the cache itself. This allows the LoadMaster to intelligently schedule compression activity, so that rapid response time is maintained under virtually all website access patterns.

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

The LoadMaster IPS provides rapid real-time alerting and blocking of application-layer threats that arrive via HTTP or HTTPS. This vital Layer 7 protection is complementary to the lower layer security provided by traditional firewalls, filling an often unaddressed gap in many organizations' security posture. The new IPS security capability augments the DoS and SSL threat mitigation already included with every LoadMaster.

The LoadMaster IPS architecture leverages the hardware-based SSL acceleration that is integrated with each appliance. This enables application-layer threats that arrive via HTTPS (SSL) to be quickly detected, with the same performance as applications that arrive via HTTP.

With a rule-based engine designed to import security rules in the industry-standard SNORT® database format, the LoadMaster IPS provides KEMP customers with complete flexibility and vendor independence in forming and maintaining their security policy. There is no recurring fee associated with the LoadMaster IPS engine. Prebuilt rulesets in the Snort® database format are available from SourceFire and other third-parties under a number of free and/or fee-based licensing schemes. These user-readable and user-editable rulesets can also be customized to extend the capabilities of the LoadMaster to mitigate threats specific to custom web applications.

Product availability

The LoadMaster new caching, compression and IPS features are available immediately.

About KEMP Technologies

KEMP Technologies is a leader in cost-effective application delivery controllers and server load balancer appliances tailored to meet the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) that rely on the Internet for e-commerce and business-critical applications. KEMP helps SMBs rapidly grow their business with 24/7 high-availability, better web infrastructure performance, scalability and secure operations—while streamlining IT costs.

Thousands of KEMP LoadMaster products are in use today to improve customer satisfaction by accelerating user access to business-critical web applications. Managed service providers also rely upon KEMP products to enable fast time-to-market and cost-effective operations for new and existing managed services.

All of KEMP’s highly affordable LoadMaster products include Layers 4-7 load balancing, content switching and server persistence, SSL offload/acceleration, WTS load balancing and persistence, with Session Directory integration, and application front-end capabilities (caching, compression, intrusion prevention system), plus one full year of product support—delivering industry leading price/performance value.

The company is headquartered in Yaphank, New York. For more information, visit www.kemptechnologies.com, or call us at 631-345-5292.

Snort is a registered trademark of Sourcefire, Inc.

Application delivery solutions are known as application delivery controllers (ADC), server load balancers (SLB), application front-end devices (AFE), web switches, content switches and application switches.

Press Contacts:

Vantage Communications	Kemp Technologies
Fran Bosecker	Marc Goodman
(845) 786-5739	(631) 251-6867