Packeteer Accelerates APP Performance In New Packetshaper Offering

PacketShaper Xpress, the latest addition to the company's flagship PacketShaper application traffic management family, adds application traffic acceleration to speed the performance of networked applications and extend bandwidth resources, said Mike Urban, senior manager of product marketing at Packeteer, based here.

Traffic on enterprise networks is increasing by 40 percent each year, but in today's environment customers are considering compression-based acceleration solutions rather than upgrading bandwidth on their congested links, Urban said. A lot of network traffic is bandwidth-intensive but not urgent, such as casual Web browsing, e-mail and file transfers. That activity can squeeze bandwidth, slowing traffic for latency-sensitive applications such as SAP and Oracle, as well as Citrix Systems-based traffic, he said.

Packeteer leveraged its Web acceleration and content compression technology to create a universal traffic acceleration solution that is scalable and simple to administer, Urban said. Combining Layer 7 classification, traffic shaping and application-intelligent acceleration raises the level of control customers have over the performance of their networked applications and associated bandwidth costs, he said. "Our focus is to help our customers align the performance of applications with the charter of their businesses by giving them control over network traffic," he said.

PacketShaper Xpress builds on Packeteer's application-level traffic classification, monitoring, analysis, control and reporting technologies to deliver a complete solution for application quality of service, Urban said. With the company's complete solution, IT organizations can gain a clear understanding of what's running on their networks and how critical business applications are performing, and then apply the precise level of traffic shaping and acceleration required for each class of traffic, he said.

Scott Strochak, president of Xtelesis, a solution provider in Burlingame, Calif., said Packeteer's addition of application compression and acceleration to its lineup was a good move. "It's definitely a nice addition to the things they already do," Strochak said. "It allows us to take customers from a three-box solution down to a two-box solution."

Slated for availability this month, PacketShaper Xpress is currently in beta-testing. Pricing for Xpress upgrades to existing PacketShaper systems is expected to begin at $1,000.