Coyote Point Systems was a manufacturer of computer networking equipment for application traffic management, also known as server load balancing. In March 2013, the company was acquired by

Fortinet Fortinet is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and sells cybersecurity solutions, such as physical firewalls, antivirus software, intrusion prevention systems, and endpoint secur ...

. The company introduced hardware-based server load balancers nearly simultaneously with other large companies such as

F5 Networks F5, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in application security, multi-cloud management, online fraud prevention, application delivery networking (ADN), application availability & performance, network security, and access & autho ...

in the late 1990s. The company had its headquarters in

San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

, and maintained engineering facilities in

Millerton, New York Millerton is a village in Dutchess County, New York, United States with a population of 958 at the 2010 census. The village was named after Sidney Miller, a rail contractor who helped bring the railroad to that area. Millerton is part of the Poug ...

, USA.

History

Early Coyote Point customers included

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fra ...

for the

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Web magazine, and the online movie database

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

. Coyote Point introduced several generations of new hardware and software with increasing performance and functionality, winning industry and press awards including the 2006 Network Computing Well-Connected Award and the 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 developed traffic management appliances to improve application performance. In 2009, the company released three upgraded products as part of its Equalizer GX family of load balancing and application acceleration appliances. 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. Coyote Point's products are generally deployed at data centers, serving as front-end aggregators of an array of web or application servers.

Layer 7 The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that 'provides a common basis for the coordination of SOstandards development for the purpose of systems interconnection'. In the OSI reference model, the communications ...

rules (content switching) direct requests to servers hosting specific applications or content. Application acceleration technologies, such as

SSL acceleration TLS acceleration (formerly known as SSL acceleration) is a method of offloading processor-intensive public-key encryption for Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to a hardware accelerator. Typically this ...

and

HTTP compression HTTP compression is a capability that can be built into web servers and web clients to improve transfer speed and bandwidth utilization. HTTP data is compressed before it is sent from the server: compliant browsers will announce what methods are ...

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 is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

are used in Coyote Point's appliances with performance of over 50,000 HTTP transactions per second in network benchmarks. (pdf)

References

{{Reflist

External links

Coyote Point Systems Web site

LBdigest.com review of Equalizer 8.0 software release

Linux Journal on Equalizer E550

Networking hardware companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies