Tom Hanifan had a hunch that the 1,500 end users passing application traffic across his WAN might be tapping the bandwidth for something other than work purposes. He was right.

"We discovered traffic that we suspected was there, but had no way to prove," says the systems engineer at advertising company Arnold Worldwide's Boston location.

Last year, to avoid a bandwidth upgrade in the Boston area, Hanifan investigated traffic management products. He says he wanted to get a handle on peer-to-peer traffic hitting the WAN and decided to install Packeteer appliances to monitor bandwidth usage and get a picture of the applications traversing the WAN.

"The routers would simply tell us traffic passing over Port 80 - but all Internet traffic does that, so it wasn't detailed at the level I needed," Hanifan says. "Because Packeteer is a Layer 7 traffic shaper, it shows me everything in the traffic right down to the apps."

He configured the product to alert him to any new traffic so Packeteer can pick up even unknown peer-to-peer traffic. "If it exists, it shows up on my network, and I will stop it," he says.

The company has about 14 sites with locations in Washington, D.C., New York and St. Louis that Hanifan plans to use Packeteer to monitor as well.

PacketShaper appliances sit at either end of WAN links and perform a series of functions on traffic to get more of it to flow over a fixed-size link and to give priority to important applications. The company recently announced new plug-ins to its WAN Application Traffic Management products that enable the product to now specifically address the following peer-to-peer programs: eXeem, Hopster, Share and Winny.

The new plug-ins are available immediately. Packeteer customers with existing service contracts can download them at:
http://www.packeteer.com/support/

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.