Protocol-specific Acceleration

• TCPTransmission Control Protocol Acceleration – Provides layer 4 (TCP) protocol optimization.

The TCP protocol can be optimized by establishing a protocol tunnel to avoid subsequent 3-way TCP handshake chattiness and ensuring that the tunnel is kept alive. TCP Acceleration also allows the administrator to set the TCP receive window size to optimize the amount of data in flight given the environment characteristics and to set congestion control algorithms to best match the environment. TCP Acceleration will also reduce chattiness and the amount of data on the wire by acknowledging the receipt of packets in batches instead of acknowledging each packet individually. TCP Acceleration also notifies ECN-aware (Explicit Congestion Notification) routers without dropping packets.

• SSL Acceleration – Provides acceleration for SSL encrypted connections.

SSL Acceleration provides acceleration of SSL encrypted TCP sessions by intercepting SSL connections to configured servers and decrypting them, performing acceleration techniques, then re-encrypting them again. Only traffic to servers that are explicitly configured is SSL accelerated. Any SSL traffic that the Exinda appliance sees that does not belong to a configured server is ignored.

• SMB Acceleration – Provides layer 7 SMB1 and SMB2 (Windows File Sharing) protocol optimization.

SMB (Server Message Block), operates as an application-layer network protocol used for providing shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. May also be known as CIFS (Common Internet File System), where CIFS is a dialect of the SMB protocol.

SMB Acceleration is the file transfer specific component of the Exinda Application Acceleration Technology. To deal with inefficiencies in the SMB protocol, the Exinda Appliance has several optimizations to improve the performance of applications using this protocol, including reading ahead of the data stream, writing behind the data stream, and caching meta data on files and folders.

• NCP Acceleration – Provides layer 7 NCP (NetWare Core Protocol over TCP port 524) protocol optimization.

NCP is used in some products from Novell. NCP is used to access file, print, directory, clock synchronization, messaging, remove command execution, and other network service functions in these Novell products.