Stampede Launches 'Virtual Pipelining' for Browsers

Published: May 30, 2007

by Alex Woodie

At Interop last week, Stampede Technologies unveiled a new technology called Advanced Virtual Pipelining (AVP) that it claims can improve the performance of browser-based applications by 40 percent compared to existing wide area network (WAN) optimization controllers and techniques such as pipelining specified by HTTP 1.1. The capability will be made available next month as part of the release of Stampede Application Acceleration Series Release 2.

Stampede's Application Acceleration Series are appliances that accelerate Web application traffic using a combination of different technologies and techniques, including TurboStreaming technology, SSL client-side termination, intelligent cache differencing, image transformation, connection management, and load balancing. Stampede, which has years of experience boosting slow Lotus Notes and Domino apps, says the devices work with traditional HTTP/HTTPS, legacy TCP, Web 2.0 and AJAX applications.

Stampede describes AVP as a "highly optimized" implementation of its TurboStreaming technology, for which it has applied for a patent. In short, the technology allows HTTP browser traffic to be intermixed across multiple "pipelines" maintained by other applications. HTTP requests and responses--including the network-intensive "polling" conducted by the latest Web 2.0 and AJAX applications--from any application are intermixed simultaneously across multiple concurrent sessions.

With AVP, Stampede says it has a platform for the consolidation and aggregation of all Web traffic, in much the same way that multiple physical Ethernet cables and ports are combined to boost the speed above what any individual link can offer. By "multiplexing" individual objects and then recombining them as needed, users can squeeze more capacity out of their lines, which are being stressed with business-critical applications and data, streaming media, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic.

Stampede maintains AVP provides a superior multiplexing solution compared to the HTTP pipelining capability specified by HTTP 1.1. For starters, there is usually a limit to how many requests can be outstanding with HTTP pipelining. Additionally, separate browsers and applications cannot share sessions with HTTP pipelining. Most browsers, in particular Microsoft Internet Explorer, don't support HTTP pipelining, further restricting its use, and when HTTP pipelining is enabled, it's usually recommended that a client only pipeline up to two requests to prevent overloading servers. Finally, HTTP 1.1 pipelining is restricted to being applied only to repetitive requests such as GET and HEAD HTTP requests. In comparison, Stampede's AVP supports all HTTP requests, and it's not restricted in the number of outstanding pipelined requests that can be used, because it's being performed between Stampede's client software and the Stampede appliance.

Stampede says Advanced Virtual Pipelining will be available June 27 as part of the Stampede Application Acceleration Series Release 2. Pricing will start at $40,000 for the first appliance, with an additional $35 charged per client. For more information, visit www.stampede.com.

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