Boundary between bandwidth and Web server managers begins to blur

Two product segments that have drawn much user attention during the past six months are bandwidth and Web server management. A number of products now answer users' need for each of these services.

Let's begin with bandwidth management, the art of monitoring and shaping network performance based on either heuristic or user-defined criteria. Generally, bandwidth managers are combined hardware and software products that support active traffic rate-shaping logic, which is designed to bring more predictability to an otherwise ad hoc set of network traffic patterns. Representative products include Packeteer's PacketShaper, CheckPoint Software's FloodGate-1 and NetGuard's GuidePost. In addition, other products, such as Xedia's AccessPoint and Allot Communications' AC, combine traffic shaping with more traditional routing and firewalling services to give users more of an all-in-one product.

While most bandwidth management products are intended to support a broad range of configurations and protocols, a growing overlap exists: A rapidly evolving set of vendors offer Web server management products designed to support load balancing, network failover and operations management support for back-end Web server farms. These vendors include relatively new players, such as Atreve, Bright Tiger, IPivot, F5 Labs and Resonate, as well as some very established players (such as Cisco Systems with its Local Director product) and some re-oriented Gigabit Ethernet vendors (such as Alteon Networks with its ACEdirector).

Both product sets often target the same application: improving Web server performance. Which do you choose to get the most from your product investment? If you require a general-purpose network performance enhancement tool that can be applied to back-end client server applications, file and print response time optimization, and wringing the uncertainty out of intranet application performance, then a bandwidth management product is probably your best bet. If, however, Web server availability and performance is what you really need, Web server management products will probably be a better bet in many cases.