Joel Conover, an analyst at Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va., said Cisco almost completely dominates the market for aggregation routing, with a market share of about 90 percent. But without the performance improvements being made to the 7200 line this week, "Cisco would have been inviting competitors to come in and offer an alternative," Conover said.

He added that similar improvements are needed on Cisco's line of integrated services routers, an even more popular offering that provides data, voice and security services.

Wes Wasson, vice president of worldwide marketing at Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix, said the NetScaler 12000 will support 275,000 application transactions per second, up from 230,000 in the company's current NetScaler 10000 model. The 12000 will sell for $95,000, complete with software, Wasson said.

Major League Baseball plans to test and probably deploy the NetScaler 12000 on its MLB.-com Web site at the end of the current baseball season, said Justin Shaffer, vice president and chief architect for the site.

Shaffer currently uses eight NetScaler 9950s in two data centers in New York and Chicago to improve performance on the Web site. He said the 12000 could reduce the number of required machines, freeing up data center space while adding more capacity.