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Breaking News - Networking:

Pivia Software Speeds Microsoft NT LAN Manager

Pivia Software Inc announced that the Pivia Performance Server (PPS) now includes optimizations for Web applications that depend on Microsoft's NT LAN Manager. Pivia's NTLM optimizations improve end-user wide area network (WAN) and Internet application performance by removing several NTLM bottlenecks that appear over high latency network connections. Pivia's NTLM optimizations do not affect application authentication or security quality, and are transparent to the user and origin application.

Microsoft NTLM is the industry's most commonly used authentication mechanism for Windows applications, despite the fact that it is highly inefficient when used over the Internet or a WAN. The NTLM protocol requires multiple connections to be established and destroyed before the data can be sent to the user and the protocol utilizes TCP-based sessions as opposed to browser-based sessions. These NTLM qualities cause application latency, network bottlenecks and expensive authentication per user.

"Application security is a key requirement for global companies as they scale mission critical application deployments," said Albert Gouyet, vice president of marketing at Pivia Software. "But many companies are trading performance for security when using authentication technologies such as Microsoft NTLM over the Internet or a WAN. We are committed to offering our customers technologies that allow companies to preserve high application security without paying the price of poor application performance."

Pivia's NTLM optimizations closely control browser activity to reduce the number of browser-to-server authentication requests, thereby reducing network interactions that can degrade application performance. If appropriate, Pivia allows multiple browser connections to leverage an exiting NTLM authentication for the same user, which significantly improves the performance of WAN and Internet applications.

Key Features

  • NTLM Authentication and Connection Sharing -- NTLM connections are optimized to allow multiple browser connections to share a single origin NTLM authentication for the same user. This optimization eliminates the overhead of repeated authentication over multiple connections for the same authenticated user.
  • NTLM Content Caching -- Content is optimized and served directly from the Pivia Performance Server to authenticated users. This is tremendously beneficial when transmitting images, javascript and style sheets.
  • NTLM Application Optimization -- Web application behavior is adjusted to become "NTLM friendly" by eliminating operations that require opening and closing connections to authenticated users.
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