Foundry Networks and Blue Coat form alliance to deliver end-to-end application acceleration for customers worldwide

The joint solution optimizes 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 center manager for Internet Services Unit Saudi Arabia.

"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 optimize 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.

To improve the end-user 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.

"Solving application performance challenges while ensuring Web security and policy control throughout the distributed network is now a requirement for service providers such as ISU and enterprises alike."

said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Blue Coat Systems.

"The combination of Blue Coat and Foundry appliances provides the scalability, reliability and control that these large organizations require to accelerate the delivery of Web-based and bandwidth-intensive applications."

For enterprises, 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 with Foundry ServerIron application delivery switches enable large enterprises to increase the performance and uptime of business-critical applications.

"Our ServerIron application delivery switches extend the power of Blue Coat ProxySG appliances for large-scale, service provider caching, Web security and policy control," said Benjamin Taft, vice president of corporate marketing and alliances for Foundry Networks.

"Together Foundry and Blue Coat provide the world's most demanding enterprises and service providers with the advanced application delivery and WAN optimization tools required to manage increasing traffic load and emerging business-critical applications."

To bring this interoperable solution to market, Blue Coat is now a Premier Member of the Foundry IronPowered Technology Alliance, and Foundry has joined the Blue Coat Technology Integration Partner Program.

These programs are designed to provide solutions that help service providers and enterprises build a flexible and scalable application infrastructure