* Liz Claiborne is a veteran when it comes to WAN optimization
It’s not hard to find companies that are jumping into WAN optimization. Every month I see a handful of press releases announcing new customers that have signed on to purchase different vendors’ gear. What’s more rare is finding an old pro. But I was lucky to hear from one recently: Liz Claiborne.
The apparel company has been using traffic-shaping gear from Packeteer for six years.
Joe Yankauskas, IT director with Liz Claiborne, says the company deployed Packeteer’s PacketShaper appliances to prioritize and deliver its business-critical applications, including its ERP and retail management applications.
Six years ago, HTTP, CIFS and MAPI traffic was consuming too much bandwidth, imposing performance penalties on essential network traffic, Yankauskas says. “The original impetus was simply to make sure that our mission-critical business applications were delivered to the sites and didn’t have conflict with non-mission-critical applications like e-mail and regular HTTP traffic,” he recalls.
Prioritizing voice traffic is another key use of the traffic-shapers. Liz Claiborne started deploying VoIP technology three years ago and today it has about 5,000 VoIP phones in use. “Voice requires the highest priority traffic on the network because you can’t retransmit voice packets. If you drop a packet, you get the jitter and scratchiness on the phone,” Yankauskas says.
Liz Claiborne so far has deployed the PacketShaper appliances at its corporate data center and roughly 40 satellite offices, which are networked via a variety of T1 and DS-3 circuits. The PacketShaper appliances have “now become staple as we roll out new sites, new locations,” Yankauskas says.
But while the company’s deployment dates back six years, that doesn’t mean it’s not dynamic.
One thing that is new is Liz Claiborne’s in-progress rollout of Packeteer’s Report Center software, which will enable the IT department to centrally monitor traffic and perform trend analyses. The software creates a dashboard that consolidates metrics to make it easier for administrators to spot throughput issues and track network behavior, for example.
“At a glance, they can see how each circuit is performing and determine whether or not they have to fine-tune any of the parameters and shaping to give more availability to a particular application,” Yankauskas says.
Without Report Center, reviewing metrics requires individually pulling data from each device. “You have to attach to each PacketShaper at each site and pull down the reports,” he says.
Yankauskas is hopeful the Report Center software, once fully operational, will help Liz Claiborne more accurately evaluate and predict bandwidth requirements. With Report Center, the IT team will be able to “do careful analysis to determine exactly when we need an upgrade and when we don’t need an upgrade,” he says.
