Traffic management and application acceleration provider Packeteer on Dec. 3 will outline its vision for how to reach the nirvana of network traffic management and launch three new products that move it toward that state.
Packeteer, which pioneered quality-of-service monitoring and control of applications traffic across corporate WANs, sees that market merging with the fast growing application acceleration market. Its name for that vision—intelligent service assurance—embodies the idea that the performance of key business applications needs to improve for any user, any time and anywhere an organization resides.
“In the enterprise, theres a complex set of infrastructures that have to work well together. The challenge is that if there is a break down in any of the [infrastructure elements], execution of the business and business value creation slows down or stops,” said Mark Urban, director of marketing for Packeteer. “Packeteers vision for intelligent service assurance is for any business service to receive high performance delivery across all the different access options, actively control how the service performs and make sure it is aligned with the enterprise mission.”
The goal is to have all of the different “islands of optimization technology” integrated and have an end-to-end business service focus across all the different delivery mechanisms, Urban said.
Most competitors in the WAN optimization market provide little in the way of monitoring, measurement and control over how applications use the WAN, said Brian Garrett, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.
“WAN optimization just makes things go faster, but it doesnt decide which applications are more important to users than others, which is more important as more VOIP [voice over IP] and video is deployed,” he said.
Read more here about Packeteer.
Packeteer took three baby steps towards its vision with the introduction of an enhanced software client for WAN optimization, a new architectural extension to Packeteers appliances and a new central management system that provides an end-to-end view of performance.
Packeteers IntelligenceCenter central management system is designed to allow users to monitor, enforce and optimize application performance levels through a Web 2.0 graphical user interface and through reports that can be customized according to the role of the user.
It is made up of the IntelligenceCenter Console, Reporting Module and Data Collector. Along with performance monitoring and reporting, it provides Quality of Service policy enforcement and centralized configuration management for up to 2,500 PacketShaper, iShaper and iShared appliances.
It also includes the Application Performance Monitoring Portal that allows users to define and monitor performance levels based on thresholds for different application types traversing the network. Those include file-based, transaction-oriented, voice and video applications.
“IntelligenceCenter is the first time that someone in the WAN optimization space has pulled together the three key elements for delivering applications on the network: control, acceleration and measurement with reporting. The other guys dont measure and report well,” said Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast, a Charlottesville, Va., consulting company. “You need all three legs of the stool to stand up and know you are delivering applications optimally. Theyve had elements of this all along, but the new platform on which they can integrate all those things so you can actually coordinate and orchestrate all three of those capabilities is whats new and powerful here.”
IntelligenceCenter is available now.
The Project Turbo is an architectural extension to Packeteer appliances that allows customers to scale to support multi-gigabit-per-second links. The first iteration is a “turbo charger” for Packeteers high-end PacketShaper 10000 datacenter appliance, Urban said.
It is designed to scale functions such as bandwidth partitioning, enforce policy control and monitor all types of application traffic for high-capacity metropolitan area network links, Internet 2 and aggregate WAN/Multiprotocol Label Switching links.
Packeteers update of its Mobiliti WAN optimization client software for individual and small office/home offers users adds application acceleration technologies for Common Information File System and TCP applications as well as new caching. The current version focuses on file access, backup and disaster recovery.
The new turbo charger for PacketShaper 10000 and Mobiliti 8 software update are due in the first quarter of next year.
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