The leader in bandwidth management technology is Packeteer with it's PacketShaper product range. The PacketShaper range allow IT Departments to manipulate the available bandwidth to prioritise traffic type, guarantee minimal amounts of bandwidth for particular applications and restrict other low priority traffic.

NETprotocol is proud to be an accredited Packeteer Affiliate Partner which guarantees our clients technical expertise and a quality of service for implementation and consulting work.

The Packeteer PacketShaper range has a wide variety of applications to suit any scenario where expensive WAN/Internet bandwidth is involved. When used to control Internet bandwidth usage the PacketShaper allows administrators to prioritise traffic depending on type, e.g. SMTP E-Mail traffic, to guarantee a level of service whilst restricting bandwidth for less important traffic, e.g. Internet Radio stations. This traffic management happens in real time so that the bandwidth can be optimised to allow the less important traffic when the bandwidth is not in use but immediately reallocate bandwidth when high priority traffic requires it.

This same theory can be applied to WAN infrastructure to prioritise time critical applications, such as Citrix delivered applications, whilst limiting less time critical applications to preserve overall bandwidth.

In either of these scenarios the end result is that the high priority applications/traffic always have the required bandwidth and the lower priority applications cannot encroach upon it. This leads to optimal bandwidth usage and in many cases a reduction in required bandwidth is possible, therefore reducing the overall cost of WAN/Internet bandwidth costs.

PacketShaper technology works by having a set of rules for traffic types, their priorities and bandwidth requirements. A recent addition to the PacketShaper is the ability to change this set of rules depending on time of day allowing an out-of-hours set of rules to optimise the bandwidth for different traffic types, e.g. bulk data transfers etc.

Once the PacketShaper units have been installed and Traffic rules configured they cannot just be left as traffic behaviors change and bandwidth may need re-optimisation. The process of Classify, Analyse, Control, Report allows for this to happen to always ensure optimal bandwidth use. In brief the process works as follows:

• Classify - Identify all types of traffic utilising the network and relate them to particular users/applications/background services to understand their requirements. This may also include new traffic types introduced in to network after the initial installation.
• Analyse - Determine the "un-controlled" traffic profile and the effects on other applications
• Control - Configure PacketShaping to control the particular traffic types to optimise bandwidth usage
• Report - Report on traffic profiles, application performance, traffic requests that cannot be serviced and overall performance.

Once this process has been completed and optimal bandwidth usage reached the process will be repeated a regular intervals to maintain the optimal usage situation. In many cases after the initial implementation & review process bi-annual reviews are often satisfactory to maintain optimal operation.