1. Technology

1. PacketShaper System Architecture

1. Layer 7 Classification

1. Network Application Monitoring

1. QoS & Rate Control

1. Compression/Caching

1. Protocol Acceleration

1. Branch Office in a Box

1. WAFS WAN Optimization

1. iShaper Dual Plane Architecture

QoS & Rate Control

Enjoy true QoS for all applications across the WAN—make sure your critical business applications get the priority they deserve.

Enjoy True QoS

Packeteer's patented QoS and Rate Control technologies provide a simple way to prioritize business-critical applications, contain recreational traffic and mitigate risk from worm and virus infections and smooth jitter. With Predictive Scheduler, TCP Rate Control, UDP Rate Control, Session Provisioning and Behavioral Threat Detection, Packeteer delivers true QoS for all application types, overcoming the limitations of queuing devices and MPLS service designs to deliver QoS in the WAN.

Rate Control Engine and the Predictive Scheduler

Packeteer's Rate Control engine works at the flow level to calculate aggregate network resource supply and application demand conditions, moment-to-moment. With real-time flow speed detection, the engine calculates a demand vector for each application flow; the Predictive Scheduler is able to forecast packet-arrival times that affect the supply and demand equations.

The Predictive Scheduler also fulfills bandwidth according to set policies—actively optimizing decisions. Working with TCP Rate Control and UDP Rate Control, the engine proactively manages congestion, preventing latency and packet drops, before queues and drops happen in the router.

TCP Rate Control: Beyond Standard QoS technologies

Standard QoS technologies—RED, WRED and dual leaky bucket—are passive queuing techniques that only react to congestion conditions. If there's too much traffic for a given link, they either hold (queue) or drop packets—resulting in poor application performance—because data is stuck or the connection has throttled back. Also, retransmission sends the same data twice, wasting bandwidth.

Packeteer's TCP Rate Control proactively prevents congestion by managing the rate at which traffic is placed onto the network. The flow speed detection and predictive scheduler optimize supply/demand decisions and manage bandwidth allocations. TCP Rate Control then meters acknowledgments going back to the sender and manages the advertised window sizes to control data rates.

Allocate Bandwidth for Inbound QoS

Packeteer's unique bi-directional QoS services truly covers in-bound traffic—when other queuing technologies usually only address dropped traffic after its crossed the WAN, resulting in wasted bandwidth and added congestion. Our TCP Rate Control manages the rate at which data is put onto the network, enabling you to allocate bandwidth among several remote sites and servers.

This is important especially in IP VPNs (via Internet or MPLS), in which a single PVC delivers connectivity to many different sites—without the benefit of site-to-site PVCs to control allocations of bandwidth. What happens when there's too much traffic from five different sites to a branch location? Don't look to an MPLS network with marked service classes. And what about too much Class A traffic for a given link? Congestion in the carrier's network goes through the queue/hold/drop problems. Not an issue with Packeteer.

UDP Rate Control

Consider non-TCP traffic—via UDP-based applications that represent about 10 to 20 percent of network traffic, including Voice and Video over IP (VoIP). Our UDP Rate Control technology leverages the same aggregate view of the network supply/application demand equation and the Predictive Scheduler to provide UDP applications effective QoS.

PacketShaper manages UDP packets on a flow-by-flow basis—at the application level—providing much more intelligent management than aggregate queuing schemes. UDP delay bounds allow you to specify how long packets can remain buffered during times of congestion. For example, a delay bound of 200 ms is appropriate for a streaming audio flow.

Select priority policy—for transaction-oriented traffic—or rate policy classes for persistent UDP traffic. Use a minimum rate for each UDP flow guaranteed in bits-per-second—24 kbps to each VoIP stream, for example.

Application Session Provisioning

Leverage Packeteer QoS technologies to provision bandwidth for specific application sessions. With our Layer 7 Plus, differentiate business critical traffic from recreational and less important applications. Use rate policies to ensure a minimum rate per individual application session. Allow that session prioritized access to excess bandwidth. Then set a limit on the total bandwidth it can use. A policy can keep greedy traffic in line or protect latency-sensitive sessions—any unused bandwidth is automatically lent to other applications.

Behavioral Threat Suppression

Worm, virus and other Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) problems can bring down a network immediately. As malicious code attempts to spread, they create floods of connections to probe for vulnerable computers. Packeteer’s Behavioral Threat Suppression technologies track flows per application and per host—providing the tools to finding and stopping infected PCs.

Packeteer identifies hosts that are initiating large numbers of flows—using Flow Limit policies to immediately curtail impact of infected hosts, by dropping excess flows and containing the infection. Network security is enhanced and network availability is assured during times of attack.

Mark Applications for MPLS and VPLS IP VPN

MPLS leverages multiple service classes—assigning different ones to different applications with different performance characteristics. There are hundreds of different traffic and application types running across the WAN—business applications, recreational applications, "invisible" services—and only a handful of service classes. Using our advanced Layer 7 Plus technology, Packeteer automatically classifies applications—identifying and then marking them with the proper DiffServ Code Point (or VLAN tag) to get them into the proper service class.

Dynamic Partitions

An elegant component of Packeteer’s policy framework is the use of dynamic partitions, per-user partitions that automatically manage each user's—or groups of users'—bandwidth allocation across one or more applications. Very useful for equitable bandwidth allocation, dynamic partitions provide the ability to easily scale bandwidth fairness; simplifying administrative overhead and allow over-subscription.

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