Rapid and unpredictable growth in Web services applications is driving the need for highly flexible Web infrastructure solutions and new ways to accelerate application performance. Traditional load-balancing appliances based on dedicated hardware can restrict agility and add unnecessary complexity to the network topology. Recent advances in performance and virtualization with Sun CoolThreads™ servers have enabled Sun to team with Zeus Technology to provide a next-generation solution for load balancing and application traffic management—a solution that combines the high-performance throughput and virtualization capabilities of Sun CoolThreads servers with the flexibility and power of Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) software.