After last May's Networld+Interop, I wrote about a relatively new class of products that extract and organise the salient points from a sea of network data in a way that enables companies to make task-specific business and technology decisions. These intelligent network optimisation tools offer an alternative to adding bandwidth, and are promising to improve network performance and save money.
Network upgrades and cost-saving measures represented two of the top five overall IT priorities, according a recent survey of IT managers conducted by ZDNet. (These priorities are reflected in the IT Radar on ZDNet TechUpdate.)
One of the products that attempt to get more performance out of limited bandwidth is Packeteer's PacketShaper family of network appliances.
Sitting near a LAN's connection to a wide area network (WAN) or the Internet, Packeteer's appliances can keep an eye on all inbound and outbound traffic. After looking at the traffic, Packeteer uses a database of close to 500 traffic profiles to decide which applications were the sources of the traffic. Based on that information, it then optimises that traffic in accordance with the business priorities programmed into the PacketShapers.
A PacketShaper is required on each end of the pipe. Packeteer has PacketShapers for every connection type, from fractional T1 to OC3, and company officials claim that the devices can automatically discover and self-configure each other without much involvement from the network manager.
One of PacketShaper's first decisions is whether or not the traffic should be passed at all. In true firewall style, PacketShaper can deny safe passage to certain traffic based on the source application or the destination. Right away, this decision reduces utilisation of the private WAN or Internet connection--which translates into more bandwidth for other traffic.
Next, PacketShaper makes a pair of important decisions regarding the source application. One of these decisions concerns the application's priority. For example, a Voice over IP application (VoIP) or intranet Webcast can be programmed to receive a higher priority than less time sensitive traffic such as email. Such priority decisions are controlled by the network administrator, who would be responsible for aligning the priority decisions with the business objectives.
The optimisation effect of prioritisations like this allows network administrators to make sure that certain traffic gets through an existing pipe before other traffic. By doing this, a company can avoid the add-more-bandwidth technique that it might normally respond with when performance-sensitive applications suffer due to network congestion.
In addition to acting on the priority (based on the source application), PacketShaper goes one step further in the optimisation process: compression. Packeteer's application knowledge base knows which of the 500 or so profiled applications can have their traffic compressed and how effective that compression can be. For example, HTTP traffic has plenty of headroom for compression, while VoIP traffic is typically already compressed. Compressing all traffic equally (when only some traffic is compressible) would actually slow things down. Company officials say that the PacketShaper also uses the source application data to determine which of several compression techniques to use. Compression is the main reason that a PacketShaper is required on both ends of the pipe.
Between priority setting and compression, the end result, say company officials, is highly optimised traffic and a fast return on investment when compared to brute force methods such as adding more expensive bandwidth or compression appliances that treat all traffic the same.
Could a one-time investment in optimising your traffic end up costing less than the total recurring costs associated with purchasing additional bandwidth? You'll have to do your own tests and ROI calculations to determine if Packeteer's solutions, which range in cost from US$2,200 to US$3,500 per device, make sense for you.
