I notice that Cisco has released 2.1.0 for the Cisco ACE today. A quick read of the release notes show lots of fun goodies packed inside. These features are starting to ‘catch up’ with the F5.

I have installed the ANM 1.2 management platform in the last couple of weeks and will post a review soon.

Release Notes here

New Software Features in ACE A2(1.0)

The A2(1.0) software release provides the following expanded features and functions:

•Enhanced load-balancing support:
–SIP
–Extended RTSP
–RADIUS
–RDP
–Generic protocol parsing

•Enhanced predictors:
– Adaptive algorithms
– Least loaded
– Least bandwidth

•General SLB enhancements:
– KAL-AP
– HTTP header rewrite
– Partial server farm failover
– Application-based probes
– SNMP-based probes
– UDP fast age

•SSL enhancements:
– Hardware accelerated
– Hardware-assisted probes
– Session ID stickiness
– Session ID reuse
– SSL queue delay
– Client authentication
– URL rewrites for SSL

•Fast DNS load balancing—UDP booster
•XML-tagged configuration
•ANM 1.2 support
•Real-time TCP dump
•Management traffic protection
•Redundancy (high availability) sync improvements
•Source NAT changes
•Protocol inspection enhancements:
– SIP
– ILS/LDAP
– Skinny

•ACL improvements—object grouping
•Denial-of-service protection—SYN cookie per interface
•Rate-limiting enhancements:
– Connection-rate
– Bandwidth-rate

•HTTP firewall features:
– Inspect HTTP POST body
– Inspect HTTP secondary cookies