Seven months after networking firm Radware bought Nortel's Layer 4 – 7 business, the new owner has updated the Alteon line of application delivery appliances with the addition of the Alteon 5412.

The new appliance's launch comes about seven months after Alteon was acquired by Radware from Nortel.

The Alteon 5412 is aimed at large enterprises, carriers and datacentres, and boasts application switching throughput capacity of up to 20Gbps. It can cope with up to 340,000 Layer 4 transactions per second (TPS) through four 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) ports and 12 GE ports, Radware said.

To ensure the high availability required by carrier-class equipment, the 5412 is built on custom-made hardware coupled with features such as dual power supply configurations and redundant out-of-band management ports.

The Alteon 5412 also incorporates the Virtual Matrix Architecture (VMA), a distributed processing software architecture that creates a virtual pool of memory and processor resources that can be shared across the switch to process traffic from any port.

According to Nir Ilani, director of product marketing at Radware, the 5412 uses the same Alteon OS and interface as its predecessors to ensure that "there is no learning curve for existing customers upgrading to the new applicance".

Ilani also detailed the company's five-year platform longevity guarantee, which ensures that the 5412 will be sold for at least the next five years, helping give peace of mind to new and existing customers.

"Radware is building a bank of goodwill with Alteon customers and partners by restoring the Alteon brand and advancing the product line with the introduction of the 5412," said Lucinda Borovick, research vice president of data centre networks at analyst firm IDC.

"Offering platform longevity with a five-year support programme, Radware Alteon customers can reduce capital and operational expenditures, making the 5412 a credible long-term application delivery option for global enterprises."

The Alteon 5412 can be purchased on a pay-as-you-grow model, where customers select one of four licences – eight, 12, 16 or 20Gbps – and can then choose to upgrade the licence at any point, with extra capacity being unlocked as soon as the new license key is entered.

Coinciding with the launch of the 5412, the company is launching the "Alteon is Back!" campaign, which sees the reinvention of the Alteon superhero character, first introduced by Alteon WebSystems before it was acquired by Nortel.