It's interesting that we're coming out with an announcement about our support for Cisco Application Control Engine modules and appliances today, considering it's the same day when Juniper announced that it's not going to continue their DX application acceleration offerings. Juniper made the decision, because, according to Network World, "[Juniper] regards it as insufficiently distinguishable from competitors' devices."

Application accelerators and application delivery controllers can indeed be hard to differentiate. As one poster on Fark (and I have no idea how it ended up on Fark) put it, "The load-balancer market is starting to commoditize. This is not unlike the HTTP cache market about ten years back."

We just put out a press release with details about our support for the Cisco ACE application delivery controller. The NetQoS Performance Center and its application response time, network traffic analysis, and device performance modules are available today, integrated with Cisco ACE - a module to Cisco's CAT6500 switch and 7600 series router which provides load balancing and content switching, focusing on acceleration, security, and availability.

And it's particularly important because one of the reasons that this partnership developed was because players in this market, including Cisco, are looking for ways to differentiate their offerings.

One of those ways is being able to quantify the performance gains of the solution - with NetQoS Performance Center integration, network engineers and sysadmins can tell exactly what benefit they got for their investment in the hardware. Being able to justify your budget easily and quickly is a major selling point, and while there hasn't been a lot of focus on using response times to measure the effectiveness of load balancers, it seems a logical next step, considering we've already worked with Cisco before to provide this functionality in Cisco WAAS WAN Optimization devices.

Often, network engineers are forced to rely on CPU utilization, memory utilization, and disk usage as measurement. However, in order to really get an idea of how the application is performing for the end user, network engineers need to baseline and track server response time and application performance. In order to continue to provide good performance for the end-users, it's important to get alerts when deviations from normal performance occur and automatically investigate the source of performance issues. Combining response time metrics, historical SNMP data, and NetFlow traffic analysis is a very powerful combination.

Now, I can't tell you that there aren't perhaps other ways to differentiate your offerings. If I had a solid but unremarkable application-delivery controller and I was trying to compete with the Cisco ACE/NetQoS Performance Center integration, I could probably… paint it pink or something. You know, so that it stands out in the data center, so that people looking around will say: "Hey, what's that pink box?" Would spread word of mouth, maybe.

Or I could give away beer from a microbrewery with every purchase. I know a guy named Orf who has his own brewery. He's a good guy.

Wait! I've got it! every fifth application delivery controller is filled with delicious candy! Mmm, Candy…

What would make you choose one application accelerator over another? Please leave a comment if you'd like to chat about this. Or want candy. Mmm, Candy.