Stampede Unveils Bandwidth Solution for Hungry AJAX Apps

Published: May 9, 2006

by Alex Woodie

One of the vendors demonstrating new wares last week at the Interop industry conference in Las Vegas was Stampede Technologies, the Dayton, Ohio, provider of application and network traffic acceleration solutions. Stampede was showing off its new Web 2.0 Performance Series, which has several interesting elements, including a solution for the network bloat created by AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications, and is slated to ship in just three months.

While consumer and business users thrill at the prospect of quick, responsive Web applications that look and behave like locally installed applications, the network managers are secretly cringing at the bandwidth crunch that will be created by AJAX and XML, according to Gordon Dorworth, president and CEO of Stampede.

"As these new technologies are used for developing SOA applications, even greater pressure is put on the network, and overall performance tends to suffer," Dorworth says. "Asynchronous and polling message paradigms are constantly opening and closing TCP sessions, and large amounts of XML data and cookies will bloat the network bandwidth. In addition, network latency concerns are an even bigger issue for interactive, rich client applications, and these networks become even more vulnerable to attack."

Stampede's solution to the network problems created by SOA, XML, and AJAX is its Web 2.0 Performance Series. The new solution will work by using a combination of techniques, including XML document differencing, bi-directional compression, document "streaming," and SSL acceleration. The solution will be available as an appliance on August 1, with pricing starting at $40,000.

In a separate, but related, announcement, Stampede said it was working on new technology called "Acceleration On- Demand," which will be available August 1, either as part of the Stampede Application Series solution, or as part of the company's Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series. Client licensing starts at $35 for a single license, and appliance pricing starts at $35,000.