Packeteer's Four-In-One Advantage

VISIBILITY  |  CONTROL  |  ACCELERATION  |  MANAGEMENT

1. Visibility: Layer 7 Classification and Monitoring
Visibility is first step in building an "intelligent network" that optimizes WAN application performance across the enterprise - and an integral component of Packeteer's four-in-one solution.

Visibility into performance of over 450 applications and network utilization:

You can only control what you can see! When it comes to managing your WAN, a picture is worth a thousand words. With unrivaled Layer 7 classification and monitoring, Packeteer delivers a clear view of exactly what applications are running on the network and how those applications are performing. Eliminate the guesswork and 'finger pointing' and determine precisely what is to blame for poor application performance. Packeteer appliances integrate transparently into your network, determine how WAN and Internet resources are being used, and provide an accurate path to fix network and application performance problems.

Benefits

• Increase visibility and simplify troubleshooting by isolating performance issues quickly.
• Identify the true nature of traffic and differentiate between mission-critical, recreational, and malicious traffic types, even over common ports.
• Monitor utilization and performance by link, application, or users.
• Track application response times and quickly identify if issues are server- or network-related.
• Establish and monitor service-level agreements for critical applications or links.
• Identify misbehaving users and malicious traffic.
• Provide detailed performance diagnostics that include connection profiling and server responses (TCP Health), PacketCapture, traffic forensic history and more.

Capabilities

• Identify applications with Layer 7 intelligence, network information, and behavior tracking to accurately identify and track network traffic. Differentiate between applications that masquerade common ports (port 21, port 80, etc), masquerade (P2P) hop ports (stateful applications), or tunnel.
• AutoDiscovery automatically discovers, classifies and measures traffic.
• Flexible classification methodology and sub-classification techniques on HTTP, Oracle, Citrix, and other applications enable granular traffic categorization for thousands of application types.
• Link-level intelligence includes MPLS, VLAN, DiffServ, IP address, port & TOS, frame relay and ATM VC information.
• Measure network and application utilization, including peaks, averages, top talkers and top listeners, network efficiency, bytes, compression rates, bytes transferred and saved.
• Measure response times across applications, providing network delay, server delay, and congestion metrics.
• Service-level tracking and management: Performance thresholds, events, and synthetic transactions to provide active response-time and availability statistics.

How to get Visibility
PacketSeeker provides complete visibility at each WAN link on which it is deployed. For maximum flexibility to meet customer needs every unit can be easily upgraded using software keys to unleash additional features - there's no need to swap hardware. Once you have visibility into your network, simply implement a software key to upgrade PacketSeeker to include control capabilities and to take advantage of industry-leading compression and acceleration.

PacketShaper comes with both visibility and control already configured for immediate use. Visibility reveals the problem while control allows you to easily implement policies that resolve network and application performance issues. While Packeteer protects your investment by providing an easy upgrade path from PacketSeeker to PacketShaper using software keys, most companies need both visibility and control right away - simply deploy PacketShaper to get both instant network visibility and the tools to control bandwidth consumption and application behavior.

Building further on PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress provides visibility, control and acceleration. As with PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress is configured to provide all of these capabilities right away. When you know you need visibility, control, and acceleration, deploy PacketShaper Xpress. And in keeping with our desire to protect your investment in Packeteer solutions, PacketShaper can be easily upgraded to PacketShaper Xpress using software keys.

Policy Center greatly simplifies multi-unit deployments by centralizing configuration tasks and the software-upgrade process and by providing an overview of all managed devices.

Report Center provides centralized management and reporting information that is retrieved from PacketSeeker, PacketShaper and PacketShaper Xpress appliances. This allows for easy management and consolidated reporting of application performance throughout your network via a single interface.

2. Control: Bandwidth Management and QoS
Control is the second step in building an "intelligent network" that optimizes WAN application performance across the enterprise - and an integral component of Packeteer's four-in-one solution. 

Control over application performance and network utilization.

Protect business-critical applications while controlling malicious traffic such as viruses and worms. Once you know exactly how applications are performing over the WAN, you can fix performance problems by applying policies that change network and application behavior. Control bandwidth utilization and application performance by actively preventing network congestion. Packeteer allows you to ensure true QoS for business-critical applications — from voice and video to CRM and ERP.

Benefits

• Eliminate the network as the source of performance issues.
• Quickly fix performance of critical applications by ensuring that bandwidth resources are allocated appropriately.
• Stop the cycle of bandwidth upgrades -- reclaim bandwidth by controlling recreational and malicious traffic and preventing inefficient networks.
• Control network congestion, traffic latency, and application response times (overcomes queuing deficiencies in routers and other devices).

Capabilities

• Partitions and policies provide bandwidth maximums or minimums per application, per user, or per flow to provide protected resources, containment partitions, or fairness between users.
• TCP Rate Control, UDP Rate Control, and Advanced Queuing provide control over all types of network traffic.
• Shaping actively throttles traffic at end stations and predictively schedules when traffic is sent. This prevents congestion, eliminating dropped packets (retransmissions and timeouts) and queues (latency) common in queuing-only devices like routers and other network devices.
• Adaptive Response agents monitor and react to system, unit, network, and application characteristics. When thresholds are exceeded, Adaptive Response can take actions ranging from gathering detailed information through PacketCapture or Top Talkers, to automatically fixing the problem by creating a partition or applying a policy.
• Packet marking for DiffServ, MPLS, VLAN, IPTOS, and more leverages application-intelligent classification for your router (or your provider's routers).
• Bi-directional control capabilities provide for one unit control over remote sites (when traffic moves in a hub-and-spoke method).

How to get Control
PacketShaper comes with both visibility and control already configured for immediate use. Visibility reveals the problem while control allows you to immediately implement policies that resolve network and application performance issues. While Packeteer protects your investment by providing an easy upgrade path from PacketSeeker to PacketShaper using software keys, most companies need both visibility and control right away - simply deploy PacketShaper to get both instant network visibility and the tools to control bandwidth consumption and application behavior.

Building further on PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress provides visibility, control and acceleration. As with PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress is configured to provide all of these capabilities right away. When you know you need visibility, control, and acceleration, deploy PacketShaper Xpress. And in keeping with our desire to protect your investment in Packeteer solutions, PacketShaper can be easily upgraded to PacketShaper Xpress using software keys.

Policy Center greatly simplifies multi-unit deployments by centralizing configuration tasks and the software-upgrade process and by providing an overview of all managed devices.

Report Center provides centralized management and reporting information that is retrieved from PacketSeeker, PacketShaper and PacketShaper Xpress appliances. This allows for easy management and consolidated reporting of application performance throughout your network via a single interface.

3. Acceleration: Compression and Protocol Acceleration
Acceleration is the third step in building an "intelligent network" that optimizes WAN application performance across the enterprise - and an integral component of Packeteer's four-in-one solution.

Control over application performance and network utilization.

Once you have visibility into and control over the WAN, the benefits of compression and protocol acceleration can be fully realized. Without control capabilities, you'll relinquish additional bandwidth to aggressive applications like P2P. In conjunction with Packeteer's patented control capabilities, compression can be intelligently applied only to the applications it will benefit, and the resulting additional bandwidth can be selectively allocated to the applications that run your business. With protocol acceleration, you can speed application delivery and maximize bandwidth utilization. Whether you need to accelerate time-sensitive transactions or large file transfers, Packeteer protocol acceleration will overcome WAN latency issues so you can provide peak performance.

Benefits

• Quickly increase WAN capacity over the same physical links.
• Improve application performance and user response times.
• Ensure that critical applications receive increased capacity.
• Minimize latency and boost Web performance.
• Easily scale to accommodate large environments.
• Accelerate TCP over high latency links, such as satellite.
• Optimize WAN applications performance and link utilization and efficiency.
• Enhance Web-based application performance and improve response times.
• Speed up large flows and file transfers.

Capabilities

• Utilizes multiple techniques including fragment caching, multiple compression algorithms, header compression, and packet bundling to compress and minimize traffic.
• Application intelligence provides ability to optimize compression gains and minimize latency by employing best approach to different traffic types.
• Plug-in architecture enables simple mechanism to update with new algorithms and approaches for continued innovation and improvement in gains.
• ActiveTunnel Management simplifies setup, assures easier scaling of large environments, and actively monitors tunnel quality to maximize reliability.
• Ramp flows beyond TCP constraints.
• Accelerate TCP over high latency and high loss links.

How to get Acceleration
PacketShaper Xpress provides visibility, control and acceleration capabilities already configured and ready to perform. Working in conjunction with Packeteer's unmatched Layer 7 classification functionality, PacketShaper Xpress automatically applies the best-suited compression algorithm based on the application type. With application-intelligent compression, bandwidth usage is significantly reduced, control features allocate extra bandwidth to business-critical applications, and WAN performance is fully optimized.

Part of Packeteer's suite of acceleration capabilities, SkyX Protocol Accelerator enables users to increase the amount of data carried over the WAN, accelerate Web applications, and speed transaction and large file transfer response times. A single SkyX appliance can accelerate WAN links up to 155 Mbps.

Policy Center greatly simplifies multi-unit deployments by centralizing configuration tasks and the software-upgrade process and by providing an overview of all managed devices.

Report Center provides centralized management and reporting information that is retrieved from the PacketSeeker, PacketShaper and PacketShaper Xpress appliances. This allows for easy management and consolidated reporting of application performance throughout your network via a single interface.

4. Management: Centralized Management and Reporting
Centralized Management is the fourth step in building an "intelligent network" that optimizes WAN application performance across the enterprise - an integral component of Packeteer's four-in-one solution.

Centralized management of performance analysis, reporting, and policy administration for large Packeteer deployments.

Packeteer's ReportCenter™ leverages the powerful network utilization and application performance statistics available in Packeteer® appliances and offers a centralized reporting platform to monitor and manage large deployments efficiently. ReportCenter streamlines collection, collation, storage, analysis, and distribution of Packeteer statistics to lower ownership costs.

Packeteer's PolicyCenter™ streamlines the management of large Packeteer® deployments by centralizing administration tasks on one policy console. PolicyCenter simplifies management tasks and lowers ownership costs in the process.

Benefits

• Acquire system-wide visibility throughout the WAN and Internet
• Centralize, simplify administration and management tasks
• Consolidate performance, utilization, and policy views into central locations
• Distribute reports easily throughout your organization via ReportCenter's Web portal delivery or via email
• Centralize and simplify administration and management tasks.
• Lower ownership costs and simplify management.
• Manage multiple Packeteer appliances as if they were a single unit by administering partitions and policies from one policy console.
• Respond quickly to network and application performance changes on an enterprise-wide scale.

Capabilities

• Track high-level indicators of performance issues with link load measures, critical and marginal performance thresholds, event tracking, and guaranteed rate failures.
• Drill down into detailed statistics or different device groupings to isolate sources of problems quickly.
• Isolate specific causes of problems down to the flow level with top talker/listener reports, service, port, and application reports, and IP conversation pairs.
• Collect, store and manage performance data in an embedded, enterprise class DBMS.
• Manage as many as 1000 Packeteer® appliances while maintaining quick and efficient performance analysis.
• Set access rights to different views of the network; Favorites page quickly brings users to relevant information.
• Disseminate traffic classes quickly as new applications emerge.
• Centrally configure and manage adaptive response agents
• Centrally manage software versions and distribute PacketWise software updates.
• Configure multiple PacketShaper appliances simultaneously, including publishing new policies to multiple units in a single step.
• Minimize the administrative overhead and total cost of ownership associated with PacketShaper appliances.

How to get Management
PacketSeeker, PacketShaper and PacketShaper Xpress can be centrally configured and managed by Policy Center and Report Center.

Policy Center greatly simplifies multi-unit deployments by centralizing configuration tasks and the software-upgrade process and by providing an overview of all managed devices.

Report Center provides centralized management and reporting information that is retrieved from PacketSeeker, PacketShaper and PacketShaper Xpress appliances. This allows for easy management and consolidated reporting of application performance throughout your network via a single interface.