The products are part of a "hot, emerging market" for application acceleration products, which has involved several mergers of smaller companies with larger ones in recent months, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at Yankee Group Inc. in Boston.

Two of the new products, the DX 3280 and DX 3680 are designed for application acceleration in data centers, and the hardware is being announced with a new version of software, DXOS v 5.2, according to a company statement. The DX 3280 will ship in early 2007, starting at US$24,995, while the DX 3680 is available today, starting at $49,995.

A new Juniper WAN acceleration product, the WXC 590 is available now, starting at $24,995, with new WX CMS v5.4 software starting at $5,795 for a license for 10 platforms, the company said. Two appliances on a single link can support 45Mbit/sec. throughput to 140 sites, according to the company.

Keith Wingate, network administrator at Mustang Engineering LP in Houston, said he wants to test the new WXC 590 sometime soon to improve throughput of complex data used by civil engineers passing Computer Aided Design drawings and related data. Currently, Mustang runs WXC 500 appliances in four remote locations, working with similar Juniper gear in a data center in Houston, Wingate said.

The WXC 500s have been used about a year, with theoretical throughput of 40Mbit/sec., he noted. However, in actual use, the throughput of the applications runs about 10Mbit/sec, he said, which is still a vast improvement over having no application acceleration products before a year ago, Wingate added.