This week in our "ADS Customers Speak" series we ask Blue Coat Systems customers to share their experiences with Blue Coat's Proxy SG product. We've gotten some great and in many cases passionate feedback from customers of other vendors, and now it's Blue Coat's turn.
Adaptable is an apt word to describe Blue Coat Systems. Founded in 1996 as Web Appliance, it subsequently changed its name to CacheFlow, and finally to Blue Coat Systems in 2002. It rode the dot-com “everything is Web” wave, and when that wave crashed onto reality’s shore, it switched focus to “old fashioned enterprise applications rule”. The industry’s current wave, “turn all enterprise applications into web applications” returns it comfortably to its original roots. Along its journey two years ago Blue Coat added application acceleration and control to its ProxySG product, morphing it from a centralized to a hybrid centralized and distributed application delivery system (DADS) appliance.
Blue Coat is the only ADS vendor with a solution that addresses the intersection of traditional enterprise applications that operate exclusively within the firewall and new Internet-based applications that, although used within the enterprise, are served from outside the firewall.
The ProxySG moves up the acceleration value chain as customer needs and the traffic mix allows. The appliance first applies bandwidth management and in-line compression. It then adds protocol optimization for TCP, CIFS, HTTP, FTTPS and MAPI, followed by object caching (file-level) and/or dictionary compression (byte–level). These features are packaged in the traditional lineup of large appliances for the data center, small boxes for the remote office, and an SG client for the roaming user.
Blue Coat’s differentiation comes from its heritage handling public Internet traffic inside the enterprise. The initial product function was to cache popular Internet content so the enterprise could delay upgrading Internet access bandwidth as the employee Web use increased. When the dot-com wave crashed, Blue Coat ProxySG appliances were adapted to also shield enterprise from “bad” content and restrict where enterprise users could surf. In today’s market, the melding of security and acceleration, as well as the melding of centralized and distributed ADS solutions make for a powerful combination.
If you have deployed a Blue Coat ProxySG solution, tell us what you think. Does it live up to your expectations? What were your impressions? A simple "I like it", "I have mixed feelings", or "I hate it" response is fine--but if you have insight to share with the community, then talk all you want. You can post a reply to this blog using your name or anonymously.
If you are using another vendor's product, your turn will come in a future blog.
NetForecast is an internationally recognized engineering consulting company that benchmarks, analyzes, and improves the performance of networked data, voice, and video applications.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Couldn't love without them!
We've been a Blue Coat customer for a year, and we're not sure how we got by before. We use Blue Coat SG's at the edge of every LAN, and chose them because of their strength in the Proxy space, as well as the application acceleration. Our feeling was that the Blue Coat attacked all the causes of slow performance over a WAN connection, whereas most of their competitors only tackle one piece of the problem. After a year in production, our initial assumptions have been proven correct, and it is still our opinion that Blue Coat has the best understanding of the "big picture."
Great product that addressed our requirements
We have recently successfully deployed Bluecoat SG appliances across eight countries.
This was to address Corporate Security Compliance requirements and improve performance of our VPN-based WAN links across our region. The links have high latency (mostly satellite based) and high speed links come at a premium price (if available). Therefore, that it was imperative that we optimised link performance and at the same time controlled & prioritised traffic over these links.
We started out looking for separate solutions for Proxy, Security and Content Control and WAN Optimisation until we discovered Bluecoat SG appliances!
Bluecoat SG appliances enabled us to control content + optimise performance. The configuration of WAN optimisation functionality was extremely simply. (Following the setup of the acceleration function, the comment from one of the staff was – “Is that all?”). It also didn’t take much time to understand the Visual Policy Manager for content control – streaming traffic – skype, peer to peer, chatting etc could be controlled easily. As it integrates with our Active Directory, we can tailor policies by using Windows Groups. Users also authenticate against our AD.
We went through a journal of discovery! Who was doing what at what time? What traffic was hogging the bandwidth? It has a good real-time traffic analysis tool and easy to use reporter that provides graphical reporting out of the box. This then allowed us to fine-tune our content control and acceleration & bandwidth management policies.
User feedback was also great for improvement in web application performance (but understandably not so good regarding content control!). We have also had financial benefits - we reduced our excess Internet data charges by 45% on one of our links.
Support from Bluecoat has been excellent. We have had easy access to support staff and field Engineers. Our questions & issues were addressed promptly.
Going forward, we will continue to improve/turn-on more functionality (eg. SG Client) and roll-out to other locations.
Increase WAN performance with added security and control
Managing internet, increasing application and file transfer speeds, with bandwidth management was the most important factors that we needed to address in our business. We had used other WAN optimisation technologies previously but found them to be complex, didn't optimise overall traffic and didn't offer integrated web filtering, bandwidth management and added control like BlueCoat.
We found the BlueCoat ProxySG to deliver on maximum performance of all file types and enhanced application optimisation and bandwidth control. Its powerful MACH5 technology makes a difference, integrated with detailed statistics also provide valuable reporting and trending for all traffic types.
We also took advantage of the BlueCoat web filtering option which is the best web filter on the market in my opinion. The granular level of configuration is unbelievable, enterprise wide web filter or user level filtering can be added and much, much more. All internet activity then can be viewed with BlueCoat reporter which is extremely good reporting tool.
One option that really made a difference was the bandwidth management feature built into the ProxySG. We now can priorities any type of traffic via the BlueCoat with even further QOS control and monitoring over a router QOS.
Congestion on the network has decreased due to less traffic traversing the network back and forward, especially with internet traffic being controlled and monitored. We don't lose valuable bandwidth to non-business related websites and protect our organisation from user doing the wrong thing on the internet.
We also use BlueCoat RA, which is extremely good Secure Remote Access Gateway and allows employees and contractors to access our network how we want them to.
If you want to decrease your WAN cost and increase your company’s productivity, then BlueCoat will definitely give you excellent ROI.
Overall, since we have gone to BlueCoat we have noticed massive increase in WAN and internet compression which results in superior application, data and internet acceleration, which results in users being more productive and allowing us to do more with our bandwidth. Better business strategies can be deployed to enhance the network architecture with BlueCoat WAN optimisation.
The BlueCoat support has been extremely helpful people. They truly do whatever it takes to get the job done. Their solution partner NetworX Enterprise is one also the best support person we have found and work closely with BlueCoat. I wouldn't recommend any other company to deploy and support BlueCoat solutions. They really know their stuff and provide absolute service. Between BlueCoat and NetworX Enterprise we are in safe hands and I mean it. We've had BlueCoat and NetworX Enterprise onsite when we want it.
BlueCoat, it’s definitely the way to go if you want to be in front of the competition. You’d be silly to not have WAN optimisation nowadays.
Acceleration + Control
When deploying with blue coat, you get the added benefit of being able to apply policy and acceleration at the same time. We have found that the devices are very well positioned in our network to do both of these things (rather than have separate devices, or perhaps layer3 routers) to do the access control. We are very pleased with the result.
And of course, how can a large company be "big brother" without SSL interception? Another one of our highly used blue coat features.
Bluecoat Kills 2 Birds With 1U
Our corporation rolled out Bluecoat appliances to all 24 of its locations across the country. Our primary reason for utilizing the Bluecoat was the consolidation of WAN acceleration with proxy services within a single device.
The WAN acceleration is one of the most integral components of our network architecture. It allows our remote locations to leverage lower cost connectivity while achieving much higher data throughput. We have achieved a higher level of performance while limiting our variable communication costs.
On the proxy side, the integrated internet filtering and pass through authentication gives us both internal and external security and reporting transparent to users.
Blue Coat Proxy SG, It really works!
I'm in charge of one Government account who has 18 different Internet accesses all over the country with more than 50,000 Internet users. We had supported and managed their Blue Coat proxy SG solution that is running on each Internet access. I'm glad to tell that the solution works, yes, it works and works very well!!! including the management part so the performance. My customer does not just use it just as proxy, they had implemented, with our help, the Web content filtering on all the Blue Coat Proxys. Besides that we also implement bandwith management to ensure response time to the business applications.
Great solution !!!
We have over 600 branches and over 5000 users. We have 2 SG-800 that we use as Proxy/Cache and Content Filtering. We also use the bandwidth management feature prioritizing business related traffic.
All our users authenticate against AD, and we can use NT Domain Groups in our policies. The authentication is transparent for the user, as it's made in the background by the browser.
We also use the multiple gateways option that gives us load balancing of outgoing traffic and link failover. For incoming traffic (clients) we use the failover option that really works, when one of the appliances goes done for OS upgrade, power failure or any reason, the other appliance takes over without the user ever knowing something happened.
The BlueCoat support team has been very helpful, and we really very happy with the BlueCoat solution.
Huge increases in WAN speeds
We installed three Bluecoat boxes in our environment, mainly for web acceleration. But where we found the biggest gains was in our CIFS and SQL traffic. We have had bandwidth issues in the past while pushing large software updates (25Mb on average) from one of our SQL applications to the desktop. Since it's the same file to multiple desktops on the same LAN segment, Bluecoat's ability to cache the update at the local site has made my users very happy. Plus, any downloaded windows updates (sp, office updates, etc.) were also accelerated.
I'm very pleased with the performance and the ease of installation.
Keep the garbage off the WAN
One of the key reasons in out selection of Blue Coat over the other players in the market is the ability to perform content filtering in addition to optimization. With our remote client offices, there are fairly strict policies regarding web content access. Therefor e instead of passing traffic across the wan that would be blocked, we are able to block the request at the remote office. This feature in addition to the remote client capabilities sum up the reasons for our selection of Blue Coat.
Blue Coat, a mandatory item in your WAN infrastructure
WAN Acceleration should be mandatory in your infrastructure, and I recommend Blue Coat due to its effectiveness, simplicity and excelent cost-benefit.
Last year we had two important changes in our IT infrastructure at Westcon Brasil. We moved all of our critical application servers to an outsourced datacenter, and we were afraid the 1 Mbps MPLS WAN would impact application performance for our 100 users. We made a successful move to the datacenter in one night and one day (a holiday), and in the following day users did not even notice performance degradation compared to the previous work day. That was thanks to Blue Coat, which accelerated our mission-critical ASP.Net sales and operations systems to LAN-like performance. We also shot down the distributed Exchange architecture and centralized it with one Exchange server cluster in the datacenter, ruling out some mail issues that we had had before. In this case, WAN acceleration worked by supressing massive amounts of email traffic (e.g. attachments to multiple recipients) from traversing the WAN.
Then, we began a company expansion by opening offices in Fort Lauderdale and Mexico. This time, we had to begin small, with low cost, so we used redundant Internet links and VPNs to connect them to the datacenter in Brazil. Blue Coat allowed us to keep IT costs down while people worked with the same performance thousands of miles away, even with the higher latencies of international Internet connectivity. A secondary objective was to accelerate our Sharepoint intranet, also with excelent results. It is worth mentioning that doing the basic WAN acceleration configuration from zero in the Blue Coat unit is so simple it takes less than 20 minutes to complete if you are doing it for the first time.
Definitely, WAN acceleration technology is here to stay and Blue Coat has the right technology mix needed for application acceleration, server consolidation and together with VPNs, beautifully completes the package needed for low TCO, high performance and secure remote networks.
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