Gear squeezes more out of WAN links

CUPERTINO, CALIF. - Looking to give customers multiple ways to squeeze better performance out of WAN links without buying more bandwidth, Packeteer is adding compression to its packet-shaping gear.

The company says that its new PacketShaper Express software will be able to cut traffic volume by 50% to 90%, depending on the application, freeing up bandwidth that could be used to handle more traffic or give better performance to select applications.

The software runs on Packeteer's hardware platform, PacketShaper. It sits between LANs and WAN routers, and can reserve bandwidth for key applications and queue traffic by application so the top-priority applications get preferential treatment. With the addition of compression, users will be able to optimize the performance of important applications across WAN links where bandwidth is limited.

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CUPERTINO, CALIF. - Looking to give customers multiple ways to squeeze better performance out of WAN links without buying more bandwidth, Packeteer is adding compression to its packet-shaping gear.

The company says that its new PacketShaper Express software will be able to cut traffic volume by 50% to 90%, depending on the application, freeing up bandwidth that could be used to handle more traffic or give better performance to select applications.

The software runs on Packeteer's hardware platform, PacketShaper. It sits between LANs and WAN routers, and can reserve bandwidth for key applications and queue traffic by application so the top-priority applications get preferential treatment. With the addition of compression, users will be able to optimize the performance of important applications across WAN links where bandwidth is limited.

"Compression and traffic shaping are complementary and maximize bandwidth efficiency," says Lawrence Orans, a senior analyst with Gartner.

Packeteer joins Expand Networks and Peribit Networks, which offer compression devices and have added traffic-shaping support during the past few months (see story). Expand also has added encryption (see story). Packeteer always has specialized in traffic shaping.

PacketShaper Express can be configured to compress only certain applications and ignore others, eliminating compression delay for applications that are ignored. Trying to compress applications such as video and voice that already have been compressed by video gear or IP PBXs would do little to reduce their volume. The default compression setting on Express avoids compressing MPEG, voice and HTTP-S traffic that is already compressed.

PacketShaper Express is part of the 6.0 release of the software for its PacketShaper hardware platforms. Customers pay extra for a software key to turn on the compression, $1,000 for up to 2M bit/sec of traffic, $5,000 for 10M bit/sec and $10,000 for 45M bit/sec. The company says the software will be available in March.

Read more about lans & wans in Network World's LANs & WANs section.