Coyote Point Systems
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Networking hardware |
| Fate | Acquired by Fortinet in March 2013 |
| Headquarters | San Jose , United States |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Application traffic management devices, server load balancers, Equalizer GX series |
| Parent | Fortinet (since 2013) |
Coyote Point Systems was a producer of networking hardware focused on application traffic management, commonly referred to as server load balancing. In March 2013, Fortinet completed its acquisition of the company.
During the late 1990s, Coyote Point introduced hardware-based server load balancers alongside industry leaders such as F5. The company was based in San Jose, California and operated engineering centers located in Millerton, New York, USA.
History
Among its initial clients were Wired for the HotWired online magazine and the film database IMDb. Over time, Coyote Point rolled out several iterations of its hardware and software platforms, each offering improved capabilities and performance. This progression earned the company accolades including the 2006 Network Computing Well-Connected Award and the Info Security Global Product Excellence Award. Its VLB technology, which provided load balancing tailored for VMware, received nominations for Best of Interop 2008 and SYS-CON's Virtualization Journal Readers' Choice Awards.
Products and technology
Coyote Point engineered traffic management devices intended to optimize application delivery. In 2009, it unveiled three enhanced models within its Equalizer GX series, designed for load balancing and accelerating applications. These devices assess server and application health, directing user requests to servers best equipped to respond. Commonly installed in data center environments, Coyote Point’s solutions act as front-end aggregators managing multiple web or application servers. They employ Layer 7 content switching techniques to route requests to specific applications or content types. Advanced units also offer application acceleration features such as SSL offloading and HTTP compression.
The company’s appliances integrated proprietary hardware components—including Layer 2 switching modules and SSL offload processors—alongside a custom FreeBSD-based operating system, enabling them to surpass 50,000 HTTP transactions per second in performance testing.