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Itanium upstart teams with Zeus for load balancer of the future

Zippy little guy

Secure64 - a potential savior for the Itanium processor - has signed a software development deal with Zeus Technology to build a zippy, secure load balancer.

The two companies yesterday announced their partnership, saying the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) will be ported to Secure64's software. The software pairing - due to be completed by early 2006 - should give customers one of the highest-performing load balancers around, if a shared press release is to be believed.

"We were extremely impressed by the performance benchmarks achieved by Secure64," said Steve Palmer a VP at Zeus Technology. "Their speed and security innovations combined with ZXTM's intelligent traffic management, security and optimization features will greatly enhance our customers' application infrastructures."

Regular readers will recall our exclusive report on Secure64's patents. The company is trying to create a type of thin, operating system-like software package specifically for Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor. The software has two specific objectives in mind - speed and security.

With one of the Itanium processor's inventors on its side, Secure64 managed to create software that taps into specific parts of the Itanic architecture. It hopes this will give the software advantages over general purpose operating systems and make it ideal for running quick load balancers, security appliances, web servers and application servers.

Such lower-end systems would be a welcome new market for the likes of Intel and HP, which have only enjoyed a modicum of success selling Itanium servers at the highest-end of the server market.

Secure64 still hasn't revealed much in the way of exact detail about its product, which is due out this year. Sources, however, indicate that the software does produce quite dramatic performance gains with application servers and the like. ®

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