* Proficient Networks software upgrade adds application awareness
Proficient Networks next week is expected to upgrade its flagship route control software, which the company says can help enterprise network managers automate changes to network conditions to improve application performance.
Proficient Networks offers its Pathfinder software on the Network Policy Engine (NPE) appliance to measure end-to-end WAN performance. It responds to problems, to automatically fix them and prevent congestion, the company says.
The appliance sits on a corporate LAN as a router peer and monitors traffic in and out of the site’s Internet connections. Based on policies set by users, Pathfinder can route traffic to the ISP that provides the best performance or charges the lowest rates, or it can balance the two. For example, a user could set a policy that traffic is sent to the best-performing ISP unless it costs less to use a slower ISP and the slower ISP’s latency is less than 50 milliseconds more than that of the best-performing ISP.
Proficient next week will introduce Version 3.0 of Pathfinder, which now includes an application awareness feature. The upgraded software will let enterprise network managers define application performance thresholds and manage IP VPN and Internet traffic to meet demands. The NPE technology can adapt to changing network conditions by ignoring minor changes in one performance metric while reacting to significant changes in another. For example, if packet loss variations are small across different network paths, but delay varies significantly, the NPE automatically selects the path that minimizes delay.
Also new from Proficient next week will be its Report Panel 3.0 management software. The software shows applications running across the network and provides detailed end-to-end performance management reports. Version 3.0 provides network performance reports to refine application-aware network performance policies.
