Foundry and Blue Coat team up

Foundry Networks and Blue Coat systems are partnering to deliver an end-to-end applications acceleration system for Internet Services Unit (ISU), an internet services provider based in Saudi Arabia.

ISU has deployed Blue Coat ProxySG appliances and the Foundry ServerIron to provide users with a high-quality experience. The joint solution is designed to optimize ISU’s network to accelerate the delivery of requested content to users throughout Saudi Arabia.

“By adding Foundry ServerIron traffic controllers and Blue Coat appliances, we can provide reliable, consistent application delivery, security and an excellent user experience for our customers,” said Hani Al-Thubaiti, network operations centre manager for Internet Services Unit.

Al-Thubaiti continued, “As content demand grows with our customer base, this powerful and scalable solution allows us to simply slide in another Blue Coat appliance and configure the ServerIron switch to use the new resource.”

For service providers, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances offload processing functions from its servers to speed application delivery and protect the network from potential threats. To optimise network performance, Foundry’s ServerIrons load balance traffic across the server farm, increasing application availability and scalability.Deployed in tandem, Foundry’s ServerIrons efficiently balance traffic across multiple Blue Coat ProxySG appliances, allowing service providers to scale its network bandwidth up to multiple trunked 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) connections to dynamically increase bandwidth as data traffic increases. To reduce management costs, service providers can add additional ProxySG appliances as they grow, without configuration changes.

In order to improve the end-users experience by reducing application response times, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances cache content, including video, locally to speed delivery to end-users. Foundry’s ServerIron Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) then directs users to the closest location to retrieve the requested content improving efficiency to minimize latency.

“The combination of Blue Coat and Foundry appliances provides the scalability, reliability and control that these large organisations require to accelerate the delivery of web based and bandwidth-intensive applications,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Blue Coat Systems.

According to the two companies, the combined Blue Coat and Foundry solution accelerates time-sensitive business applications across the network and provides high availability at the application-level, increasing productivity. Blue Coat ProxySG appliances together with the Foundry ServerIron application delivery switches are designed to enable large enterprises to increase the performance and uptime of business-critical applications.