United States: Expand Networks www.expand.com, the leader in optimizing WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualization, yesterday announced the availability of its latest Accelerator operating system – AOS 7.0.1. The new AOS runs across Expand’s full range of physical & virtual Accelerator solutions, introducing new features that further enhance the user experience in high-latency satellite environments, enable integration with Red Hat’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine solution and assist the integration of third party tools to provide improved visibility, control, ease of use and configuration capabilities.

Key features of AOS 7.0.1 include:

Read Ahead for HTTP Objects

Scheduled Pre-fetch for HTTP Objects

KVM Support

SNMP Statistics MIB

Efi Gatmor, CTO of Expand Networks, comments, “AOS 7.0.1 builds on Expand’s unique capabilities in providing effective WAN optimization solutions for high latency environments such as satellite communications. Furthermore, through integration and support for Red Hat’s KVM solution we’ve enhanced our virtualization offering to enable OEM partners and MSPs to integrate Expand’s Virtual Accelerator in the remote branch office. We believe these enhancements combined with improved visibility and control for third party applications, as well as upgrades to address new security vulnerabilities, add significant benefits to our customers.”

AOS 7.0.1 Technical Notes:

Read Ahead and Scheduled Pre-fetch for HTTP Objects

Links on a current web page are analyzed, pre-fetched and cached utilizing the Read Ahead functionality. Ideal for users working in high-latency, low bandwidth satellite environments, this significantly improves user experience by enabling an immediate response to subsequent web pages. Configurable options also allow the user to determine the level of read-ahead downloads and the resources used.

Scheduled pre-fetch (including immediate, specific or recurring scheduling) allows users to download and cache data from a pre-determined destination at a specified time, thereby significantly optimizing load times for web pages. This is ideal for environments where multiple users access common HTTP objects such as video files, documents or presentations.

KVM Support

Deployed on Red Hat’s KVM, the Virtual Accelerator fully integrates into this virtualization solution. The Virtual Accelerator has full licensing server support via a connection to the Expand Networks’ licensing server, which it automatically recognizes and connects to within the network. This solution is intended primarily for OEM partners that wish to integrate our virtual Accelerator in the remote branch.

New SNMP Statistics MIB

Responsible for managing all statistics in the Accelerators, Expand’s statistics server has an enhanced MIB, which enables further visibility and control for third party applications that can pull statistical data from the Accelerator using the SNMP protocol. This interface can be used to create reports for a specific entity or for a family of entities up to total reports. Periodic statistics are available for specified times.

Other enhancements include new networking capabilities for ease of integration and deployment, and security enhancements.