ACE (Application control engine) is a device that utilizes intelligent NAT to load balance traffic to servers Load balancing decisions can be based on any information within the L3 to L7 data. ACE handles all primary functions in hardware and has many, many hardware processors that are specific to each task it needs to do.  Full Article…

L3-L7 load balancing – you can check IP, port, cookie. SSL encryption and decryption in HW – servers in general doesnt have special HW for encryption and decryption. It hits its CPU. thats why its better to put this to LB. HTTP Optimization and Compression – saves bandwidth in HTTP communication, HTTP optimization keeps track  Full Article…

Cisco ACE support visualization like in ASA in context behavior. ACE device allows up to 255 contexts to be created. Each context is a sandbox, that means you can restrict amount of resources for each context. Context are allocated resources by the Admin context. Each context has its own FT group and can fail over  Full Article…

We have many management options for Cisco ACE: telnet/ssh, http tacacs/radius for acces XML API – you can create your own gui or tools for sending commands For ACE4710 a build in gui is available For ACE10/20/30 and ACE4710, ANM (application network monitoring, its just GUI) is available Global server load balancing (GSLB) GSS (global  Full Article…

You should read wiki for ACE http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Cisco_ACE_4700_Series_Appliance_Quick_Start_Guide,_Release_A3%281.0%29_–_Overview for better understanding.