Price breakthrough Web Load balancer from Red Hill Networks

TUSTIN, CA - February 2, 2000 - E-commerce depends on reliable web servers. But web servers go down -- costing e-commerce providers millions of dollars annually. Red Hill Networks, the e-commerce infrastructure company introduces the WebMux LE. As a new member of the WebMux product line, the WebMux LE features a price breakthrough MSRP $3,999. With the new breakthrough price point, the load balancing functions are no longer the exclusive domain of the large companies.

The WebMux LE like other members of the WebMux family is an integrated load balancing solution which, deployed by ASP and Web farm providers, will significantly reduce downtime for e-commerce sites. In the past, when too many users have tried to go to the same Web site at the same time, the Web site became overloaded--a problem popularly known as the "Slashdot effect", and responsible for millions of dollars annually in lost revenues and expensive hardware upgrades. WebMux, based on a proprietary Red Hill algorithm optimized to process large numbers of simultaneous Web requests, was designed as a scalable and flexible solution to the Slashdot effect.

The algorithm allows WebMux to process incoming traffic and distribute it across an array of linked computers, effectively turning a web farm into a single parallel supercomputer. WebMux efficiently processing and routing the IP traffic to serve up fresh content at high speeds with little downtime. A built-in sensor checks at layers four and above to determine what kind of traffic is incoming--from Web surfing to file transfers. And persistent connection support makes sure that cookies and other personalized user interaction stays personalized.

Beside the Web hosting sector, analysts expect WebMux to have the greatest impact on the growing Applications Service Provider (ASP) market. As ASPs come online with customized solutions that take advantage of broadband connectivity, the need for reliable infrastructure that can quickly be expanded is growing. The new WebMux offering will allow Red Hill to provide one-stop shopping for ASPs looking to ensure their reliability: Red Hill Networks has already won industry acclaim in this area through WebSpray, a Web server testing tool which combines a point-and-click interface with the ability to simulate up to 1000 clients from multiple IP addresses.

For a limited time, WebSpray will be provided free of charge to all WebMux users, according to the Red Hill announcement. Among WebMux's other features are an easy, secure management interface which allows the load balancer to be handled from anywhere on the Internet, and firewall protection, including Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, TCP SYN protection, and Network Address Translation (NAT). WebMux Pro offers additional fault tolerant protection through an intelligent secondary load balancer that automates the configuration process.

WebMux LE will be made available through leading worldwide distributor TechData, a Red Hill partner and Fortune 500 company. Through its business-to-business infrastructure portal, TechData distributes to over 70 countries and serves over 100,000 resellers worldwide.

ABOUT RED HILL NETWORKS

Red Hill Networks is a Tustin, California based e-commerce infrastructure company which specializes in Web server reliability solutions. In addition to WebMux and WebSpray, Red Hill is the company behind firewall box FireSafe and upgradeable network router IntelliRoute 7000.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Analei Bodnar, Red Hill Networks
http://www.redhillnetworks.com