CAMBRIDGE, U.K. and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Zeus Technology today announced a number of innovations that feature in the latest version of its flagship Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) software, ZXTM 4.2. Zeus has added new features such as forward proxy capabilities, improved web caching and increased security and encryption support, allowing customers to better manage the performance of web-enabled applications and gain greater control over inbound and outbound Internet traffic.

One of the significant enhancements to ZXTM is the addition of forward proxy capabilities that allow organizations to better control outbound network traffic, such as employees or customers accessing the Internet. With forward-proxy mode, all of ZXTM’s content inspection, rewriting, caching, bandwidth management and rate limiting features may be used with outgoing traffic. This enables a host of new use cases, such as content filtering, service differentiation and content transformation, which will be particularly compelling for mobile operators. The forward proxy capabilities will also benefit organizations that wish to monitor and control which Internet resources their internal users can access.

The latest release of ZXTM features support for nCipher’s NetHSM cryptographic key management products, providing FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant storage for SSL keys. This is particularly useful for organizations such as retailers and banks that need to provide highly secure online services for handling transactions as it enables ZXTM to be integrated with existing secure Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) systems.

Zeus has also introduced a range of features that improve the performance of web-enabled applications. These include enhanced web caching capabilities to improve the management of cache content and deliver better performance on multi-core servers and easier set-up with Java application servers through built-in support for J2EE session persistence methods.

ZXTM 4.2 also features improved activity monitoring, giving organizations far greater insight into system statistics, such as CPU and memory usage. The new release features support for the PKCS#11 SSL acceleration capabilities of Sun’s Niagara chips, improvements to Zeus’ TrafficScript™ programming language to make coding easier and SOAP API extensions to better manage backups and permit tighter integration with provisioning systems.

“ZXTM has long been the industry’s most flexible and powerful software-based traffic manager, helping organizations improve the speed, reliability and manageability of web-enabled applications,” said Paul Brennan, Chairman of Zeus Technology. “The latest release builds on this with new features that extend the functionality of the platform, provide support for industry-leading security standards and improve content management and site performance.”

Zeus Technology