Certeon aCelera 3.0

Certeon's Co-founder, Shawn Cooney, and Director of Marketing Communications, Jane Shurtleff, made the effort to reach out to me in order to introduce me to aCelera 3.0. Those of you having long memories will recall the name "Certeon" from a previous post on the company (see Certeon's aCelera Application Acceleration Appliance.) As with the previous version of aCelera, the target is helping organizations make the best use of their network infrastructure in a secure, manageable, reliable way.

Here's how Certeon describes aCelera 3.0

Certeon's aCelera is the first and only virtual appliance for WAN optimization and application acceleration to be approved by Microsoft and VMware. aCelera software runs on industry standard servers and is supported on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors. aCelera WAN optimization and application acceleration software leverages the following benefits of virtualization:

• Enables the flexible, on-demand deployment of applications, while reducing the overall hardware footprint
• Delivers scalability by making more applications and system resources accessible to more users
• Provides centralized provisioning and enhanced security through integration with virtual machine operating system management such as Microsoft System Center and VMware VirtualCenter

Here's a figure showing the application of aCelera 3.0

Snapshot analysis

Application acceleration tools typically focus on using caching, compression and a few other types of cleverness to accomplish one or more of the following: improved performance for application, increased levels of scaleability for those applications and, it is hoped, allowing organizations to make better use of their limited IT resources. Certeon makes claims that aCelera 3.0 would help organizations achieve all three goals.

While I'm typically quite skeptical when presented with benchmark data, if Certeon's testing produced results is anywhere near what a typical organization would experience, the improvement could be striking.

At this point, Certeon is supporting VMware and Microsoft hypervisors. While I guess that selection makes some sense, I was surprised to see that no varient of Xen was listed.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

Certeon, it would be very helpful if you would interview some of your customers on camera and post short customer profiles for others to review. Some of the benefits you're claiming almost seem to be magic. While I'm absolutely certain that your words are golden and beyond question, I'm not sure everyone would take that stance.

I bet that a number of your customers would be willing to chat about 1) what they were doing that needed this type of technology, 2) what they considered prior to purchasing your product, 3) why they chose your product over those offered by others and 4) what tangible benefits they've gotten.

The benefits are far more believable when articulated by a customer rather than by the supplier.