Richard and his guest Kent Alstad of MCW Tech talked on ep174 of DNR about their new venture Strange Loop.

While details are scarce what we are talking about is a hardware appliance that implement managing state and compression in a router.  This means the ASP.Net View State is managed by the appliance.  The way this need to be seen is in light of the problem of scaling a web app from one server where inproc state management is OK to a multi-server web app where a SQL Server is used to hold the state in order to avoid problems arising from afinity: subsequent page requests need not hit the same server but that implies a trip to the SQL Server for each page view.

What Strangeloop are promising is the scalability of using SQL Server session state with the performance of Inproc state.  Oh so cool.

So the question I have is:  Where's my SQL Server appliances?  Great example is protocol encryption for SQL Server.  It's obscure and far from intuitive.  TDF is understood, as is SSL.  Someone give me a sexy 1U rack gizmo that glows blue and makes it all happen :)