* Best products sought, plus news of Packeteer’s performance booster
Do you have a favorite IT product you’re dying to rave about? I’m working on a story about IT managers’ favorite products, and I’m looking for reader input. If you’re an enterprise IT professional and you have a favorite hardware device, software application, freeware tool, or anything else, please write to me for details.
Now on to the topic of the day: Packeteer’s turbo-booster.
This week Packeteer is expected to unveil an add-on appliance designed to boost the performance of its high-end PacketShaper devices, which use compression, traffic shaping and TCP optimization to speed applications running over the WAN.
The new Talon TC30 works in tandem with Packeteer’s PacketShaper 10000 and features a new architecture with silicon from Cavium Networks to deliver traffic-handling speeds up to 6Gbps. In addition, the Talon TC30 can support up to 10,000 traffic classes for organizing traffic flow.
“It’s a hardware assist that we’re using to turbo-charge the performance of the PacketShaper 10000,” says Sidney Rabsatt, senior product marketing manager at Packeteer.
The Talon TC30 can do application discovery, performance reporting, bandwidth partitioning, and policy enforcement for up to three concurrent Ethernet segments connecting to a customer’s WAN links. The Talon TC30 also can alert administrators if service-level performance is jeopardized, and it offers anomaly detection to contain the propagation of viruses and malicious traffic.
Deployed together, the Talon TC30 and PacketShaper 10000 complement one another, Rabsatt says.
“The pairing of the devices is managed by the PacketShaper, so operationally it’s not a stretch for customers. The interface is through the PacketShaper 10000,” he says. “The PacketShaper appliance is responsible for classifying and measuring the traffic, the Talon appliance is responsible for the heavy-duty packet processing, moving packets from one interface to the other, and enforcing the policies that have been configured.”
The Talon TC30 geared for the largest WAN links, to help control traffic running across high-capacity OC-12 to OC-48 networks, for example.
“Enterprises, higher education, government networks, software service providers and ISPs are all adding more high-capacity OC-12 to OC-48 links to alleviate congestion and performance concerns, expanding their bandwidth as well as their cost of doing business,” said Lucinda Borovick, director of data center networks at IDC, in a statement. “Identifying applications and controlling their performance at these higher link rates is critical for any firm that depends on network performance.”
The Talon TC30 is the first product delivered on Packeteer’s new architecture. “In the next version of Talon, we’re looking to move toward the 10Gbps range — not just 10Gbps, but tens of gigabits per second of throughput, leveraging this network processor to be able to deliver that,” Rabsatt says.
The list price for Packeteer’s Talon TC30 is $24,000.
To learn more about application acceleration and WAN optimization devices, check out our Application Acceleration and WAN Traffic Optimization Buyer’s Guide.
