Blue Coat touts ‘application accountability’
Application-level visibility is key to maintaining acceptable performance for end users and maximizing a company’s existing network infrastructure. If IT can’t tell whether an application is business-critical, recreational or malicious, what good are bandwidth management controls?
This week Blue Coat Systems is highlighting the value of what it calls “application accountability,” whereby IT pros can get a detailed view of network traffic in order to better control applications and the resources they consume. To that end Blue Coat unveiled an update to the software that runs its PacketShaper gear, which it acquired with the purchase of Packeteer last year.
A key new feature in PacketShaper 8.5 appliances is the integration of real-time monitoring, historical reporting and QoS controls into a single workspace. This lets IT view application behavior over a period of time and across a flow of packets — rather than basing an assessment on a single packet at a single instance of time, Blue Coat says.
For management purposes, the new version also lets IT automatically group similar applications together and control them as a class. For example, all P2P traffic or all games could be treated the same.
The upgrade also provides new controls for VoIP applications: PacketShaper 8.5 can distinguish between a call using a specific make or model of an enterprise VoIP phone system and a consumer software application that uses voice, such as Google Talk. Blue Coat says it’s the first to be able to make these distinctions.
PacketShaper 8.5 also now can identify and manage network traffic from VMware View Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications. With this kind of visibility, IT can control when VDI set-ups and downloads occur so they don’t dominate WAN capacity at a critical time. (If PacketShaper is used in conjunction with Blue Coat’s ProxySG WAN optimization appliances, a company can also speed the time it takes to load a virtualized desktop onto a remote computer in a branch office.)
“With the new release, PacketShaper appliances can now distinguish between the various VMware operations, including configuration and login, offline desktop downloads and synchronization and VDI Remote desktop streaming,” Blue Coat says.
PacketShaper 8.5 will be available this month as a free software upgrade to existing PacketShaper customers with current support contracts.
