Co-emergence: Newcomers take aim at ASPs

Funny how every segment of this century-old industry seems to be in its infancy. Such is the case with application service providers.

Some ASPs have seen success, but the technology enabling that business still is young - and complex. The technology must marry IT platforms to switched and private networks. Sprouting alongside fledgling ASPs are the tools used to measure their performance and ensure the quality of service (QOS) for critical applications.

Packeteer was one of the first companies to enter this market. It uses its traffic management experience in the corporate WAN to target the ASP market. Its PacketShaper product hit the market last November.

But others are joining the game. Sitara Networks is a new entrant in the ASP traffic management tools market. The company will leverage years of network management experience with companies such as Cisco Systems, Motorola and Nortel Networks to improve the QOS needs of ASPs.

Sitara's mission is to provide QOS appliances that enable ASPs and ISPs to offer e-business applications on private networks and public networks. The company this week is expected to launch QoSWorks, which uses AccuRate Traffic Management to integrate four traffic management tools into one customer premises device.

The software combines class-based queuing, TCP rate shaping and packet size optimization; it also uses an algorithm for fair allocation of bandwidth by connection.

"It's a strong value proposition for ASPs that want to deploy customer premises equipment as part of their application service delivery," said Lisa Miller, product marketing manager for Sitara. "We found most customers are trying to deploy a number of different applications and are all running into QOS problems."

QoSWorks' initial configuration resides at the edge of the network behind a router. It can be managed and configured remotely and is SNMP-compliant, which makes it compatible with most network management platforms. The system handles TCP traffic, transactional applications, very small packet sizes and voice over IP.

"The product is designed to work in concert with all other policies in a network," said Manickam Sridhar, Sitara's chief technical officer.

One of QoSWorks' key features is packet size optimization, an enhancement to TCP rate shaping. This allows the provider to control the maximum segment size of TCP traffic, which can reduce delay caused when small packets are queued behind larger packets.

"It's not fragmentation," Sridhar said. "When we see the need, we inform the sending host, and the packet is made smaller right from the origin. The advantage is there's no reassembly."

Although its product is new, Sitara has drawn attention from the ASP community. Emerging ASP AristaSoft targets the IT needs of the high-tech manufacturing industry. As it builds its infrastructure with partners such as Active Software, Clarify and Portal Software, AristaSoft uses Sitara's products to ensure QOS in its IP-based network.

"For an industry-focused ASP like us, QoSWorks adds significant value to our infrastructure platform by easily implementing service level agreements while guaranteeing performance of our customers' most critical applications," said Bharath Kadaba, chief technical officer and vice president of platform services at AristaSoft in a statement.

Coming out of the gate with an ASP customer using QoSWorks is a feather in Sitara's cap. However, the product must mature to move beyond its status as an edge device. Currently, three models handle line speeds of 64 kb/s, 384 kb/s and T-1/E-1.

That won't be a problem, Miller said. "We have architected on an open hardware and software platform so it scales very well."