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Exinda Updates Application Acceleration Appliance Operating System

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/02/10

Exinda has updated ExOS, the operating system that runs on its application acceleration appliances. Exinda's technology helps IT administrators monitor and prioritize network traffic and control network access in order to improve application performance.

One new addition in version 6.0 of ExOS is Application Quality Scores (AQS), a key performance indicator used to measure the performance of applications. AQS assigns a numerical value to determine perceived user satisfaction; this examines measurements of network delay, server delay, network jitter, network packet loss, and round trip time and converts the data into one number on a uniform scale of zero to 10. A VoIP Mean Opinion Score is a tool specifically for monitoring and measuring the user experience for voice applications. AQS allows the network administrator to set minimum performance thresholds for each application and receive real-time alerts if the levels are unmet.

Version 6.0 also provides detailed reporting on TCP health to help identify inefficient applications in the network and troubleshoot application performance issues.

Other features include SSL/HTTPs traffic acceleration between two Exinda appliances; updates to time reporting; and improvements to a graphing function.

A key feature of the new release is its compatibility with Netflow version 9 from Cisco Systems, a set of utilities for managing the traffic that moves through Cisco switches and routers. Netflow extensions enable deep packet and heuristic inspection, and reports on user identification, application groups, application response, service level agreement measurements, and utilization.

"ExOS 6.0 addresses many of the challenges facing network managers, including managing ever-growing bandwidth usage and number of complex business applications, and supporting the growing usage of cloud computing and hosted virtual desktops by an increasingly mobile workforce," said Kevin Suitor, the company's vice president of marketing. "ExOS 6.0 gives our customers the visibility and management capabilities to ensure that they can support emerging virtualization and unified communications technologies, and that their networking investments will support their overall business objectives."

In higher education, those customers include Virginia's Bluefield College and Emory & Henry College.