Networking outfit Juniper has lifted the oily rag to reveal several WAN application acceleration appliances.

Juniper claims its inspirationally named WXC 1800, 2600 and 3400 appliances are designed to deliver consistent application response across the WAN.  This means that it can behave a bit more like a LAN for those sitting in branch offices using centralized applications.

The boxes compete with gear from Cisco, Riverbed and Blue Coat. According to a company press release the gear accelerates high volumes of traffic across a range of applications, including TCP, UDP, MAPI, CIFS and HTTP/S.  On-board hard drives support Network Sequence Caching, which enables the devices to store repeated data patterns, and can produce as much as a 100-fold increase in effective WAN capacity.

The WXC 1800 can speed WAN traffic up to 2Mbps, typically at small to medium branch offices. The WXC 2600, designed for use at medium to large branch offices and small data centers, can accelerate traffic up to 8Mbps, and the 3400, for use at remote locations, head offices or data centers that require higher speeds, can speed WAN traffic up to 45 Mbps.

A 10 connection WXC 1800 will set you back $4,895.  WXC 3400, with support for as many as 140 connections, costs $25,000.