Coyote Point Systems
Encyclopedia
Coyote Point Systems is a manufacturer of computer networking equipment for application traffic management, also known as server load balancing
Load balancing (computing)
Load balancing is a computer networking methodology to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid...
.
The company introduced hardware-based server load balancers nearly simultaneously with larger competitor F5 Networks
F5 Networks
F5 Networks, Inc. is a networking appliances company. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has development and marketing offices worldwide. It originally manufactured and sold some of the very first load balancing products...
in the late 1990s, effectively creating the market for such equipment. The company has its headquarters in San Jose, California, and maintains engineering facilities in Millerton, New York, USA.
History
Early Coyote Point customers included WiredWired News
Wired News is an online technology news website, formerly known as HotWired, that split off from Wired magazine when the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast Publishing in the 1990s. Wired News was owned by Lycos not long after the split, until Condé Nast purchased Wired News on July 11, 2006...
for the HotWired
HotWired
Hotwired was the first commercial web magazine, launched on October 27, 1994. Although it was part of Wired Ventures, Hotwired was a separate entity from Wired, the print magazine, and had original content....
Web magazine, and the online movie database IMDb. Coyote Point introduced several generations of new hardware and software with increasing performance and functionality, winning numerous industry and press awards, including the 2006 Network Computing Well-Connected Award and Info Security Global Product Excellence Award. The company's VLB technology, which permits load balancing of VMware infrastructure, was nominated for Best of Interop 2008 and SYS-CON's "Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards."
Products and technology
Coyote Point's products are generally deployed at data centers, serving as front-end aggregaters of an array of web or application servers. By monitoring server and application availability and responsiveness, the Equalizer line of load-balancing appliances direct individual client requests to the server best able to handle them. Layer 7 rules (content switching) direct requests to servers hosting specific applications or content. Application acceleration technologies, such as SSL accelerationSSL acceleration
SSL acceleration is a method of offloading the processor-intensive public key encryption algorithms involved in SSL transactions to a hardware accelerator....
and HTTP compression
Http compression
HTTP compression is a capability that can be built into web servers and web clients to make better use of available bandwidth , and provide faster transmission speeds between both...
are available on Coyote's higher-end products.
Custom hardware, such as Layer 2 switches and SSL offload processors, and custom operating systems based on FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
are used in Coyote Point's appliances with performance of over 50,000 HTTP transactions per second in network benchmarks.