The new Application Layer Processing (ALP) module from Crescendo was announced last month at Interop Las Vegas 2006, where it won Best in Show. Working atop Crescendo's existing Maestro appliance, the module is designed to accelerate the flow of data in applications and databases across the Web, said Michael Long, vice president of marketing at the Tenafly, N.J.-based Crescendo.

One of the two Maestro customers, Syntenic Inc. in Montreal, is testing the new module before rolling it out to alleviate application and database performance bottlenecks behind its Web servers, said Ian Rae, president of Syntenic.

Syntenic provides managed services for companies such as Wandrian Inc. in White Plains, NY, which runs a Web application for rail travel reservations and services in 40 countries.

One potential value of the new module is to help Syntenic prioritze requests made by Wandrian users to prevent long waits, Rae said. For example, a request for information about the distance or time of a multi-link rail trip could be moved behind customers actually ordering tickets.

Syntenic is already running two Maestro 5020 appliances, each with eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, which have already helped reduce Web connection retransmissions by 50 percent, Rae said. The appliances also provide data compression rates of up to 50 percent of any given content. "If you have a crappy connection, you want to minimize the content," he said.