Packeteer Protocol Acceleration

Don't let the WAN slow business down. Packeteer's acceleration technologies overcome sluggish network performance to speed up applications.

Keep Business Moving

Network limitations slow application performance down—but they don't have to. Capacity constraints, protocol design limitations, high loss or transmission errors rates and latency—due distance or congestion—no matter. Packeteer's acceleration technology suite overcomes sluggish performance to quickly, and transparently, deliver key business applications.

High Performance Acceleration: Xpress TCP

TCP design limitations cause poor performance in certain WAN environments—inability to ramp bandwidth where there's high latency or fill large pipes even with low latencies as well as chattiness and problems with error rates, congestion and loss. Packeteer's Xpress TCP provides a transparent acceleration gateway that speeds delivery of file transfers and transactions while fully using large links and overcoming high-error environments.

Packeteer eliminates the impact that latency creates by providing a local response to connections. With Xpress TCP:

• Local acknowledgements allow TCP to quickly ramp and sustain high throughput rates bandwidth for very large flows with even low latencies. Large files transfers, database synchronizations, backups and other bulk jobs finish 10 to 100 times more quickly.
• Advanced windowing and local connections fully use links—managing acknowledgements to TCP locally—and connections grow to fill the pipe. Regain that 89 percent of a 2 Mbps connection.
• High-speed gateway also improves performance of chatty transaction-based applications where even moderate amounts of latency compound the "chatty" architecture to slow delivery.

Xpress TCP is especially useful in the following situations:

• High-latency environments (over 200 ms), including international links, satellite links and multi-hop microwave links that need to ramp bandwidth or that carry chatty applications.
• High-capacity environments (DS3/45 Mbps) with very large flows, including data center replication, database mirroring, disaster recovery storage and backup
• High error rate environments

Xpress XML and Xpress HTTP

Specialized application accelerations also eliminate delay in delivering HTTP- and XML-based applications. Rather than waiting on pipelined object requests within connections, WebXpress accelerates the initial connection setup and fetches and caches objects within HTTP applications.

Xpress XML extends the technology to new Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that use HTTP, accelerating XML connection setup and predictive fetch/cache within XML messages. Objects cached for specific connections are used only by those connections and are not available for switch cache flushing technologies.

Prevent Congestion and Decrease Latency

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. TCP Rate Control technology actually reduces congestion and the resulting latency involved.

By metering acknowledgments going back to the sender and managing the advertised window sizes to control the data rates, TCP Rate Control can throttle distant sending computers to eliminate congestion and reduce latency from queues. This reduces latency in the network, accelerating the performance of all applications.

Minimize Latency: MTU Management, Packing and Rate Control

To minimize latency and further accelerate traffic, PacketShaper's MTU (maximum transmission unit) management automatically adjusts MTU size to eliminate excess delays from link serialization delay or increase MTU to eliminate overhead from headers and acknowledgements. Selectively bundling or concatenating packets, PacketShaper evaluates packet and MTU size as well as network timing to determine if, and when, combining multiple compressed packets into a single larger packet makes sense. Packing reduces overhead and improves compression gains.

Way Fast, WAN-optimized WAFS Transport

Underpinning the Packeteer WAFS solution is a WAN-optimized transport for optimum file performance. Slash performance-killing roundtrips and eliminate redundant data transfer across the high-latency WAN—reducing literally thousands of roundtrips per transaction to just a few.

The Packeteer WAFS Transport protocol—specifically built to overcome CIFS performance issues—works in concert with data reduction technologies to make remote files behave as if they were local. Users keep working, not waiting.

Native CIFS - No Breach of Security

Packeteer's WAFS technology incorporates native CIFS technology from Microsoft for future-proof technology investments and complete end-to-end security. By coupling native CIFS technology with a WAN-optimized transport, CIFS shares extend over the WAN with unique support for end-to-end security mechanisms such as SMB packet signing.

Also, as CIFS evolves—with major revisions planned for Windows Vista and Longhorn—only Packeteer will transparently support these changes. Non-native solutions are not compatible with Microsoft security technologies and require vendors to "reverse engineer" any changes—with no guarantee of success.

Acceleration and Data Reduction Work Together

Packeteer WAFS technology benefits from a wide variety of data reduction techniques to slash the amount of data flowing across the WAN. Together, these frequently yield 99 percent reduction in bandwidth consumption and contribute to 50 percent improvement in response times.