Zeus shoots for the cloud with Traffic Manager 6.0 20 October, 2009 By Mark Cox

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Zeus is a British company, with U.S. operations managed out of San Mateo CA, that was founded 14 years ago, and which six years ago moved into traffic management and load balancing. Its' go-to-market model is very channel-centric.

"Version 6.0 is a very important release," said David Day, CTO at Zeus. "It streamlines the branding of product line and adds new technology to become the platform for Cloud Traffic Manager." Zeus Cloud Traffic Manager is slated for release in early 2010,

Zeus's software, which can be deployed in any physical, virtualized or cloud environment , gives customers real-time visibility into web traffic and online application performance to manage traffic, spot problems and add more computing power during spikes in traffic. For example, they can prioritize bandwidth usage to give logged-in customers preference over browsers.

One of their customers is the BBC's Website. The BBC is not allowed to have ads on their site in the UK. But they are allowed to show ads to non-UK visitors. The Zeus technology lets the BBC figure out where the traffic is coming from, and show ads to Web visitors outside the UK.

"Any kind of business with a Web presence can take advantage of the benefits we offer," Day said.

"SMBs also run technologies in the cloud, and they are asking for solutions, for this kind of product," Day added. Nor does Traffic Manager require high end hardware. Even running on a a low end server you can get very get good performance, Day said.

The improvements in the 6.0 version include several significant improvements to scalability. Multi-hosted IP addresses can scale clusters more easily. A Command Line Interface can also manage clusters more effectively.

Other notable changes include Solid State Disk caching to improve performance by caching more content, detailed traffic diagnostics to visualize and debug traffic applications at level Day said their hardware competitors cannot achieve, integration with enterprise authentication for streamlined administration, and geolocation technology to create location-sensitive traffic management policies.