Zeus Technology announced the release of ZXTM 5.0 (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager). This latest version is equipped with Java Extensions, enabling application architects, administrators, and developers to control their application delivery using policies that build on the body of reusable Java application code.

Zeus released the latest version of its software and announced an Early Access program where participants can be among the first to experience the improved functionality of ZXTM 5.0 (www.zeus.com/zxtm5). Java, one of the most widely-used programming languages to build web applications, has a wide range of reliable and proven class libraries to accomplish any application task – from communicating with a database, to signing a PDF file, to compressing images. With Java-enhanced ZXTM 5.0, architects, developers and administrators can expand the number of different application delivery solutions that can be built.

“Our customers told us that their requirements for the rapid, scalable delivery of applications were becoming increasingly more complex,” said Paul Brennan, Chairman and CEO of Zeus Technology. “Other application delivery controllers are not sufficiently flexible. Coupled with our compelling software architecture, Java-enhanced ZXTM 5.0 is the ideal, cost-effective software platform for building a wide array of application delivery solutions.”

ZXTM 5.0’s Java Extensions allows users to extend the capabilities of traffic management rules written in Zeus’ TrafficScript language. Java Extensions can inspect traffic in any protocol, process and rewrite it and can control how it is routed and managed within ZXTM. Java Extensions run within Zeus’ high-performance traffic management kernel and can control all of ZXTM’s traffic management capabilities: bandwidth limits, session persistence, content caching, content compression, etc. A user can leverage any of the thousands of Java class libraries to build extensions that process data, store persistent state across a cluster, communicate with other applications, apply security policies or implement almost any other conceivable traffic management policy. This flexibility makes ZXTM the only truly extensible application delivery platform.

Version 5.0 additionally provides full support for managing IPv6 traffic as well as IPv4, and adds full support for load-balancing SIP (used for VoIP applications) and RTSP (streaming media) traffic.

Interested parties can participate in Zeus’ “Early Access” program (www.zeus.com/zxtm5) to obtain an early build of ZXTM 5.0 to evaluate and prepare for deployment when it becomes generally available.

The ZXTM 5.0 solution builds on the innovations found in Zeus’ unique application delivery platform:

• Green credentials through virtualization
• Enhanced ROI through the hardware independent, extensible and flexible nature
• Improved application performance and capacity
• Best-in-class scalability
• An adaptable and agile application infrastructure with deep visualization, monitoring and control

ZXTM is an extensible Application Delivery platform that manages application traffic by inspecting, transforming and load-balancing requests across an application infrastructure. It is a software application delivery controller available on the market that is flexible enough to meet the requirements of any organization’s deployment environment, whether dedicated appliances, standard servers, blades, or virtualized environments. A typical cluster of 2 ZXTM systems can deliver over 5 Gbits of application traffic, and throughput scales linearly as further nodes are added to the cluster.

ZXTM –based products are available as Software (for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD servers), as Hardware Appliances and as Virtual Appliances (for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 and Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2).