San Jose-based Coyote Point will announce Extreme II Web acceleration products for the enterprise sector that include a Dell-based hardware platform that can handle up to 100,000 connections per second with throughput greater than 1Gbit/sec. It will also offer Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for 10,000 simultaneous transactions, according to the company.

Pricing starts at US$9,995, while a fully configured Extreme II Series system with modules for SSL acceleration, compression, bandwidth management and server load balancing is priced at $26,000. The system and all but one module are available now; the bandwidth management module ships next quarter.

Coyote began selling load-balancing products in 1998 and later moved into traffic management products -- all focused primarily on midsize customers, said founder and CEO Bill Kish. Coyote Point has 21 employees and about 3,000 customers, he said.

One Coyote Point customer, CafePress.com Inc., has been using Coyote Point load-balancing products for 18 months to distribute data loads across servers in the company's e-commerce data center, said Jim Chan, director of information systems. The Foster City, Calif.-based company offers e-commerce services through an online marketplace, and the Coyote Point products have helped CafePress.com's network scale up for Web traffic growth.

CafePress.com compared Coyote Point with F5 Networks Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and NetScaler Inc., Chan said, but all three provided features CafePress.com didn't need or want to pay for. He predicted that the new Extreme II products from Coyote Point will boost the company's ability to compete with the other vendors for larger e-commerce customers.