Networks Generation

Following David Haye's Goliath-conquering exploits at the weekend it would be no surprise to see Mike Tyson attempt to come out of retirement once again, seeing a heavyweight champion whose head he can actually reach.

But it wouldn't be Tyson actually making the big comeback this week but that Load-Balancing originator that was - and again is - Alteon. Following Radware's, er, rescue of the technology from the ill-fated Nortel, a company that had progressed the original Alteon technology about as much as the Detroit carmakers have improved automobile science since its inception, it'll be fascinating to see if a company that already has its own L-B technology does anything truly significant with its new (overgrown) baby.

In case you're wondering, Radware hasn't simply bought the Alteon customer base to flog its own technology to. You can buy a real updated Alteon product - the 5412 - from Radware. It certainly sounds a step forward though, delivering up to 20Gbps of application switching throughput capacity and up to 340,000 Layer 4 transactions per second. It also has 10GbE ports (four of them) - something that wasn't possible, short of time travel, when the original Alteon product range was launched. Moreover, these are performance figures that the old Nortel-badged incarnation could only dream of (that's Layer 8 Networking, the dream layer...).

And, reading the press release accompanying the launch, it's clear that their marketings guys have been on some kind of dream-enhancement substance:

"As the centrepiece of the new marketing campaign, Alteon's appearance personifies the strengths and evolution of the new, powerful Alteon product line, as he combats his evil network archenemies, Bottleneck, Outage, Disconnect, and Disarray - from their destructive network rampage. This sinister IT world, plagued with darkness, has slowed down application networking performance - requiring a hero to be summoned to fight network downtime and deliver super fast performance to the online world. This hero must be brave, powerful, and highly skilled... this hero must be Alteon."

Take a look for yourself, if you don't believe me: Visit: http://www.alteonisback.com

Well, at least it beats shots of metal boxes and LEDs and dull talk of ROI, business benefits and rubbish like that... I mean IT's all about entertainment, right?