iShaper™ Takes Comprehensive Approach to Solving Branch Office Problems

Packeteer’s new appliance enables businesses to address not just storage consolidation at the branch office, but server consolidation & convergence.

CIOs and other senior IT personnel understand how critical it is to the business to consolidate branch office infrastructures and cut costs at remote locations. Network and storage managers have to deal with the consequences of consolidation. Network managers know they won’t be able to ensure optimal application performance over the WAN unless they have detailed visibility into and control over traffic, and are naturally keen on ensuring that file services don’t degrade either as the distance expands between workers and the information they need to access. Storage managers understand this too but want to ensure that the solution they choose ensures continued compatibility and security compliance.

For the first time, a single unified appliance can serve the interests of all these parties: iShaper, from leading WAN application optimization vendor Packeteer. “It has appeal that goes up the way and across the way and inside of IT,” says Dave Ewart, Packeteer product marketing manager. The new offering addresses in one box all the performance technologies they need for data, voice and video but also highly compatible branch office IT services companies would like to consolidate, including those that previously could not effectively be served from the data center. The iShaper takes over file and print services, tape backup, domain controller, authentication, and DNS/DHCP services, System Management Server (SMS), network probes, and application quality of service (QoS). The appliance marks a major advance for the industry, which has primarily focused on solving problems in slow file access over the WAN, rather than on true infrastructure consolidation at branch sites.

Without iShaper, businesses must plan their budgets to account for the overhead that is required to support multiple management techniques across devices, and so they fail to realize all the cost savings they should be able to reap from consolidation projects. That changes for companies that deploy the next generation branch offices with iShaper, which simplifies management and reduces infrastructure ownership costs. “Businesses want one addressable item in their management schemas,” says Ewart.

Analysts have reached similar conclusions. Companies’ desire to remove most IT from their branch offices is “driving the need for a new appliance called a branch office box (BOB), which represents the convergence of networking, storage, and servers,” according to a recent Gartner research note, “BOBs Help You Make the Most of Branch Office WANs.”

Consolidating the equipment at one branch office on a single iShaper can, on average, more than halve the upfront costs of equipping the remote location with a standalone network probe, acceleration device, intrusion detection and prevention, domain controller, print and SMS patch server, and application level QoS. At the same time, it advances the capabilities businesses would normally get on one of these individual devices — network probe, for instance, lacks the iShaper’s application intelligence with Layer 7 Plus Classification and application performance monitoring, while a typical acceleration device provides no discretion over the type of traffic it speeds up.

iShaper: Both WAFS and WAN Optimization

The “secret sauce” that enables the iShaper to provide both WAFS and WAN optimization for the next-generation branch office is its Dual Plane architecture. Using this architecture, Packeteer has been able to combine the features of its PacketShaper WAN optimization product — monitoring, shaping and acceleration — giving companies more control over managing bandwidth allocation and utilization, along with the full-fidelity Microsoft® services found in its iShared product. iShared overcomes the effect of latency on application protocols such as Common Internet File System (CIFS) and TCP. And it provides data reduction that creates more bandwidth using optimization technologies to prevent redundant traffic from crossing the WAN, as well as compression to reduce the amount of data that does need to traverse the WAN. It’s important to note that no other player in the industry offers a true Windows®-based product to compete with iShared.

“The virtues of these two platforms have been maintained in this new product through this Dual Plane architecture, which allows you to run a Windows platform inside the iShaper device, with all new intelligent redirection between the Real-time Services PacketShaper plane and the Advanced Services iShared plane,” says Ewart.

The product knows exactly what to do with every packet and every flow, which becomes even more important as companies move to converged networks and must ensure the service quality of delay-sensitive applications, such as voice and video. A VoIP packet coming through the Real-time Services plane, for example, will be processed right away, while file traffic will be redirected over to the Advanced Services Plane for file services. “The benefits are that it doesn’t introduce any limits like you get with competitive products,” Ewart says. “On the Real-time Services side, you don’t slow anything down, so it’s more scalable and resilient. And on the Advanced Services side, you guarantee much more compliance and more secure data delivery.”

The iShaper is available in three different configurations for the branch office, for servicing from 50 simultaneous users up to a few hundred, with a disk cache that goes up to 600GB. For upgradeability and scalability, Ewart says, companies will still require a PacketShaper and iShared product in the data center. Customers will be able to order the new appliance for delivery before the end of June.

“Packeteer is excited to deliver such a innovative product to the marketplace in a single unified appliance,” says Ewart. Once again, Packeteer is stepping up to the plate to provide a much-needed solution to a complex set of application issues over the WAN.