Terry Doub faced a familiar and frustrating situation when trying to dole out network services and application traffic to faculty, staff and students at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Doub, director of the LSU network operation center, says he worked hard to keep services running without hitting the max in bandwidth capacity.

"Basically we had to increase bandwidth and shortly after it was increased we'd be at capacity again," Doub explains.

Doub knew he had to investigate another way to address slow traffic, one that didn't require frequent bandwidth investments, which didn't solve the university's problem anyway. He looked into a bandwidth management appliance, dubbed NetEnforcer from Allot Communications, to set policies and prioritize traffic traveling out of LSU's network.

"We discovered that our outbound pipe was full, but traffic coming in wasn't affected," he says.

By installing the NetEnforcer appliance between one of the university's core routers and the border router, Doub says he is able to see traffic exiting the network. He has set policies to ensure traffic coming from, say, student dormitories is limited to a certain percentage of peer-to-peer traffic. Because Doub says he didn't want to block certain types of traffic, NetEnforcer appealed to him because it allowed him to limit bandwidth and throttle back specific traffic.

"We create a policy template in NetEnforcer that gets applied to traffic based on the source IP address, so the appliance can recognize when it's from the dorms," he explains. "It will give that IP address the bandwidth policies assigned to it, but only while it's active. So if that user is logged off, the bandwidth will be allocated and used elsewhere."

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.