* Packeteer's PacketShaper addresses bandwidth management and peer-to-peer traffic issues
When bandwidth management and peer-to-peer traffic became issues for Harvard Business School, John Arsneault, director of network operations at the Boston school started shopping for technology that could address both needs.
Arsneault says because the purpose of the technology was twofold he needed to investigate technologies that allowed him to see traffic traversing the network and also put policies in place to control it. Being an academic environment, he says controlling – rather than restricting entirely – traffic such as peer-to-peer file sharing is imperative.
“Traditionally you would just put a firewall on the border and close ports, but security here can become a more philosophical discussion,” Arsneault says. “We wanted to find out what people were using and what ports that traffic passed through before we decided to shut anything down.”
In July 2003, Arsneault started working with Packeteer’s PacketShaper appliance to analyze this traffic, specifically the applications being used at Layer 7. The information, he says, would help him set appropriate policies and designate specific port for traffic.
“Within six weeks, PacketShaper showed us a list of applications and ports used in relation to the Internet connection. We were able to close 99% of the ports and still not affect a single person here,” he explains. “We never wanted to just shut down the connection and create a firestorm of controversy, but we needed to get controls in place.”
Packeteer recently made available a new guide on how to configure PacketShaper for threat containment, dubbed PacketShaper Orange Book. The guide details how to prevent network firewall intrusions through the use and configuration of the company’s PacketShaper WAN monitoring and optimization appliances
Following the security measures, Arsneault says he was able to throttle bandwidth usage and save the school some $220,000 in costs to his ISP.
“We have able to reduce utilization and choke the pipe more. We have been able to get a real granular view of what’s going on at our border,” Arsneault says.
