Ipanema Technologies recently upgraded its WAN optimization system to allow network managers to optimize more wide-area traffic - without necessarily having to install a device at each remote location.

Application traffic management vendor Ipanema says its Cooperative Optimization product is able to now optimize meshed flows in "some-to-many" or "many-to-many" network configurations without requiring a device at each location connected to the WAN.

The "tele-optimization" feature involves distributed devices constantly communicating, which the company says prevents a bottleneck between single source and destination sites. It works by educating the devices at each site with the knowledge of the traffic coming from other sites. Ipanema says application traffic is prioritized based on application policies "regardless of the network condition."

"Because the aggregation of traffic in a couple of data centers can create congestion at both the data centers and branch offices, we enable our devices to communicate with each and act on enterprisewide application policies to manage the congestion that might happen at a destination site," says Vargha Moayed, executive vice president at Ipanema.

Competing mostly with Packeteer, Ipanema uses a centralized server loaded with its software on which application performance objectives are defined centrally. Distributed devices - at redundant data center or disparate offices - perform a real-time analysis of global traffic and application mix. Sites not equipped with hardware devices - yet connected to the central data center via the WAN - still receive the benefits of the optimized traffic as traffic management policies are computed for all sites to match application performance objectives. For instance, the server may not send lower priority traffic to a remote site potentially facing a bottleneck in favor of sending the packets of the mission-critical applications.

Pricing for Cooperative Optimization can start at $30,000 and scale up from there, depending on network configuration. New optimization features are available now.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.