Radware, provider of integrated application delivery solutions for business-smart networking, today announced the expansion of its Alteon Application Switch product line with two new OnDemand switches, the Alteon 4408 and Alteon 4416. The Alteon 4-series is available less than one-year after Radware acquired Nortel’s layer 4-7 application switching business, and rounds-out the product suite together with the recently introduced Alteon 5412, which now offers complete application delivery throughput coverage up to 20 Gbps.

According to market analysis from IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, Layer 4–7 switches that can provide good visibility into application use on the network and enable a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ IT philosophy will be integral in creating the next-generation datacenter. This is fueled by a need to evolve datacenter network architecture that can fluidly adapt to real-time business demands; allowing organizations to fully leverage the benefits of hosted datacenters, cloud services, and a global workforce.

With a focus on business-IT alignment in the datacenter, Radware’s Alteon 4-series provides the required application insight to efficiently scale both service and throughput levels based on business demand. The Alteon 4-series, built on Radware’s on demand infrastructure approach, enables Alteon customers to start with a certain bandwidth and application services to meet current operational needs, and then increase capacity and capabilities on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model – without replacing or rebooting supporting hardware – whilst maintaining high performance levels in layers 4-7. Leveraging simple, easy-to-deploy software license upgrades, coupled with Radware’s five-year platform longevity guarantee, Alteon customers gain a ‘future-proofed’ datacenter solution that successfully meets application needs across Layers 4-7, ensures transaction completion with maximum performance, and minimizes capacity planning risks.

“The network is on a course to deliver a broad base of services to the datacenter and application networking is at the heart of driving the datacenter to be more responsive, in real-time, to business needs,” said Lucinda Borovick, Research Vice President for IDC’s Datacenter Networks service. “Radware’s expanded Alteon suite will be a strategic resource for Alteon customers’ datacenters, as these products enable the network to provide business value to the organization by standing between mission-critical applications and the global network of end-users.”

“We had very high expectations from Radware concerning the launch of their new Alteon platforms, and Radware delivered with the launch of the Alteon 5412 last quarter,” stated CY Hwang, Managing Director Openbase Korea. “The Alteon 5-series has already been deployed and tested by several of our customers, who have told us they are very happy especially with the technical innovation, support stability and high performance levels. Based on this feedback, we believe that the new Alteon 4-series will also attain great heights.”

“There is a clear pent up demand amongst many of our long time customers that use Alteon technology; they need greater capacities, advanced features and first rate  support,” said Bart Graf, Principal of Integration Partners Corporation, a leading US secure networking solutions provider.  “Radware has addressed these needs by re-energizing the Alteon product line – further enhancing the platforms with leading Radware technologies. With the launch of the Alteon 5412 and now the 4 Series platforms, Radware is helping us provide our customers with the products, support and innovation they need to build their businesses.”

Radware acquired the Alteon line on March 31, 2009, and made a commitment to advance the product portfolio to protect customers’ application switching investments. Today’s Alteon 4-series launch comes on the heels of the Alteon 5412 high-end solution introduction; representing a critical proof point in Radware’s year of investment in research, development and engineering support and plans to continue to invest and further evolve the Alteon product line.

“Enterprises will increase their investments in datacenter technologies as a way to improve business agility – especially as cloud services, IT-communications convergence and the software-services industries have a transformative effect on the network, while data center consolidation, virtualization and similar initiatives support the need for cost cutting and productivity enhancement,” said Ilan Kinreich, Chief Operating Officer, Radware. “The Alteon 4-series is a core component of both the current and next-generation datacenter; strategically aligning business-IT investments through real-time awareness, increased speed, performance, and compliance of mission-critical applications.”