Application Traffic CopApplication Traffic Cop

Businesses have a variety of tools designed to help them ensure high-quality Internet services. But such software is often complicated and requires savvy administrators who have extra time. Packeteer Inc. says it has an alternative.

The company will ship its PacketShaper 8500 series, which lets businesses monitor Internet services and prioritize traffic so the most important applications are allocated bandwidth first. Packeteer says the 8500 can be managed by one network administrator on a part-time basis.

The 8500 adheres to policies programmed into the system by the network administrator and acts like a traffic cop watching applications as they traverse the network. The 8500 will discover and classify applications, analyze their performance, enforce bandwidth allocation, and generate reports to help customers enforce service-level agreements. It can work with speeds of up to 200 Mbps and comes with an expansion slot for customers who want the added boost of Gigabit Ethernet.

Todd Krautkremer, VP of marketing at Packeteer, says it's best to place the 8500 next to a network router because that's often the network's pressure point. "When the high-speed LAN meets the low-speed WAN, it creates backups," he says.

Ted Roberge, manager of residential network services at the University of California, Irvine, had to deal with Internet surfers who were gobbling up bandwidth for entertainment purposes while supporting 6,600 students, faculty, and their families who use the university's network for E-mail, research, and school projects. Roberge says the surfers' appetites are insatiable. "They use 60% to 70% of our bandwidth," he says.

Using the 8500, Roberge was able to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to critical applications such as E-mail while allotting about 5 Mbits, or 10% of the university's bandwidth, for surfing. "Now everyone gets a fair and equitable amount," he says.

Packeteer's not the only one to offer such tools. Meta Group industry analyst Peter Firstbrook says NetReality, a small European firm called Allot, and Cisco Systems all offer similar capabilities. But, he says, Packeteer leads in ease of use, built-in intelligence, and number of connections supported.

The 8500 Series from Packeteer is priced from $22,000 to $49,000, depending on the configuration used, including monitoring only and policy-based conditions for proactive management.