CAMBRIDGE, England, and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Nov. 19 -- Zeus Technology and Sun Microsystems today announced a partnership to deliver Zeus’ best-of-breed Application Delivery Controller deployed on Sun’s latest CoolThreads and x64 systems hardware running the Solaris 10 operating system. Sun’s global distribution network will carry the new end-to-end application traffic management system, a powerful new combination of Sun hardware and ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager).

The new offering represents an entirely new level of scalability and performance for traffic management systems, with the combined Sun hardware and ZXTM software solution able to outperform most dedicated hardware appliances, while at the same time offering an unparalleled ability to manage application traffic -- even XML -- using traffic scripting. Large enterprises, service providers and online media companies will use the solution to deliver high-performance, reliable applications that meet service level agreements while minimizing operational costs.

Zeus Technology’s ZXTM application traffic management software directs incoming requests to the fastest server available and directs traffic away from slower or inactive servers, while dramatically increasing the number of users a server can support. Using software to load balance traffic across multiple servers makes it easy for enterprises to scale their applications. Thanks to ZXTM’s built-in redundancy features, users can access applications even in the event of a failure. Applications that are not designed for clustering can be scaled with session persistence, improving availability and response times, and application servers can be isolated from external networks, protecting the systems from external security threats, even including denial of service attacks and application-level hacking.

“This partnership is an excellent opportunity to bring the benefits of ZXTM to a broader market. Sun leads the industry in both price and performance, and running our award winning software on these platforms provides a robust, flexible application traffic management solution that can evolve to meet growing business needs”, said Paul Brennan, chairman of Zeus Technology.

The combination of ZXTM running on Sun platforms provides a best-of-breed application delivery controller, enabling service providers to offer reliable, high-performance network and Web services. Optimized for speed on Sun systems, the ZXTM software enables businesses to select from a wide variety of Sun systems running the Solaris 10 operating system. Sun's scalable server platforms, including Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology, can dramatically increase throughput and provide eco-friendly energy savings by reducing energy consumption and datacenter footprints without sacrificing high performance.

“Sun and Zeus bring to market an unparalleled offering for organizations that need to manage high volumes of traffic and mission-critical Web services. Customers can select from a wide variety of Sun systems running the Solaris 10 operating System to benefit from this best-of-breed Application Delivery Controller,” said Antony Watkins of the communications and media practice at Sun Microsystems

Sun servers continue to set new standards for performance, reliability, and energy efficiency and lead the industry in terms of price and performance. As a result, running the ZXTM software on Sun platforms provides the foundation of a robust, flexible application traffic management solution that can grow and adapt to evolving business requirements.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs)

According to Gartner, “ADCs reside in the datacenter, typically in front of frontline Web servers. They are deployed asymmetrically -- only at the datacenter end -- and are designed to improve the availability, performance and security of Web- or Internet Protocol (IP)-based applications. ADCs enhance the performance of Web-based and related applications for end users by providing a suite of services at the network and application layers.”

* “Market Share: Application Acceleration Equipment, Worldwide, 1Q07” by Joe Skorupa and Nhat Pham, June 8, 2007.

About Zeus Technology

With over 10 years’ industry experience, Zeus Technology provides application traffic management software, dramatically improving network and web-enabled applications making them run faster, more reliably, more securely and making them easier to manage. The Zeus solutions enable organizations to intelligently manage their applications, streamline operations and provide a seamless end-user experience. Zeus holds strategic partnerships with world-class companies such as AMD, Dell, Egenera, HP, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Qualcomm and VMware. Zeus powers over 1 million sites across the world and provides web infrastructure solutions to over 800 customers including, BT, China Telecom, Hotel.de, NASA, PLAY.COM, Federal Railroads Administration, ifs School of Finance, STA Travel, Strategic Command and Virgin Holidays. For more information, visit www.zeus.com.