Blue Coat Introduces Industry’s First IPv6 WAN Optimization Solution

Appliance Provides Acceleration and Optimizationto Both IPv4 and IPv6 Content and Applications
Blue Coat Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCSI), a leading provider of Web security and WAN optimization solutions, today announced that its Blue Coat^® MACH5 WAN Optimization appliance is the industry’s first solution to offer a full range of WAN acceleration and optimization capabilities for IPv4 and IPv6 content and applications, including file access, enterprise applications, live video, on-demand video, cloud services and Web content and applications. Blue Coat MACH5 WAN Optimization appliances can work in a pure IPv4, IPv6 or mixed environment. The appliance is unique in that it can also automatically and transparently solve the inherent incompatibility issue that arises when users, networks, devices, content and applications are mixed between IPv4 and IPv6.
“IPv6 presents some significant challenges to companies and service providers, ranging from traffic visibility and access control to security and WAN optimization,” said Qing Li, chief scientist and IPv6 expert, Blue Coat Systems. “Blue Coat has solved many of these challenges, and the addition of full WAN optimization for IPv6 extends our ability to help create a smooth transition and bring companies well into the future.”
Unlike competitive WAN optimization solutions, which can only provide basic data reduction for IPv6 packets, the Blue Coat MACH5 appliance works at the application level across both IPv4 and IPv6 environments. It maintains application-level optimizations for CIFS, MAPI, HTTP, SSL, RTMP, RTSP and other application-specific optimizations. Competitive WAN optimization acceleration technologies will fail when IPv6 content and applications are encountered, as IPv6 forces them to disable most application specific optimizations. Now that the industry has depleted its last remaining block of IPv4 addresses, there will be a gradual shift towards IPv6. Enterprises, organizations and service providers need to prepare to manage, secure and optimize IPv6 content and applications across heterogeneous network infrastructures that include both IPv4 and IPv6.
“Blue Coat is proud to provide the first true IPv6 WAN optimization solution,” said Steve Dehab, chief marketing officer, Blue Coat Systems. “The advances we have made in solving these complex networking issues reflect our ongoing industry and technology leadership.”
Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliances provide users with a powerful and flexible solution for optimizing file access, email, storage and backup while also providing advanced technologies for web, cloud and video applications.  They provide a comprehensive set of WAN optimization features that dramatically accelerate response time and reduce bandwidth consumption through the use of industry-leading compression, protocol optimization, byte caching and object caching technologies.  The appliances have integrated caching and stream-splitting to greatly reduce the network load of on-demand and live video from the Web or internal servers. Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliances enable video to scale across the enterprise and protect against video floods that can overtake business-critical traffic optimized by traditional WAN optimization appliances. In addition, the appliances can accelerate content and applications from the public Web without requiring cloud deployment of another appliance. By accelerating internal and Web-based applications for branch and mobile users, Blue Coat WAN optimization solutions enhance productivity across the distributed enterprise.
Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliances are also the industry’s first IPv6 Secure Web Gateway to enable the secure and seamless migration of applications, services and content between IPv4 and IPv6 environments. The Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliance acts as an intelligent intermediary between requests and content, making the retrieval of applications, services and data in either an IPv4 or IPv6 environment transparent to users. To minimize network disruption and simplify the migration, Blue Coat WAN Optimization appliances consistently enforce corporate IT policies across IPv4 and IPv6 applications and content spaces. This provides business process continuity without the complications associated with address translations, rewriting applications or upgrading the underlying network infrastructure.