Coyote Point Builds on FreeBSD to Accelerate

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Making Web applications faster is big business for big businesses-like carriers. Mid-market enterprises can also benefit from web acceleration, which is where Networking vendor Coyote Point is concentrating its efforts.

Coyote Point is now rolling out a new Equalizer GX line of Web Acceleration appliances that offer the promise of improved Web application speeds as well as the ability to directly handle VMware virtual servers to improve scalability and efficiency.

The new Coyote Point release comes as the application acceleration business itself continues to heat up with Citrix, Cisco, Blue Coat, F5, Juniper and others all vying for a piece of the pie that could be worth over a $1 billion dollars in 2010.

While Coyote Point includes its share of proprietary development and features into its Equalizer GX platform, the core platform sits on top of an open source FreeBSD operating system.

“We are using a modification of FreeBSD version 6 which provides for us the basic scaffold we need to build the appliance,”Bill Kish, CEO and CTO of Coyote Point, told InternetNews.com. “FreeBSD gives us the file system, an I/O subsystem and device drivers, Web server for our management interface and it gives us all sort of great open source tools and we use them to the fullest.”

FreeBSD 6 first came out in 2005 and has recently been superseded by FreeBSD 7, which hit version 7.1 earlier this month. Kish noted that Coyote Point will likely trail FreeBSD development by a year in order to make sure that the operating system is fully stabilized.

Kish added that Coyote also has contributed back to the FreeBSD project, specifically in the device driver area.

Though FreeBSD is at the core of the Coyote acceleration appliance, Coyote Point adds its own secret sauce to the mix as well. “When a packet actually comes into the device and it is destined for application acceleration or load balancing at that point it is picked up entirely into our code,” Kish explained.

“So we didn’t have to put effort into developing the other bits and pieces we rely on the FreeBSD community to do that for us. When the actual traffic management is involved, we optimize that and that’s where our core intellectual property is in understanding the application flows and how the protocols work,” he added.

FreeBSD is no stranger to the networking operation system world. Juniper Networks’ JUNOS was originally based on FreeBSD.

Kish noted that Coyote Point has been around since 1999, focusing on application traffic management, load balancing and acceleration. With the Equalizer GX platform they’re also getting into integration virtualization into the mix.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.