Solutions for Recreational Applications

Peer-to-Peer

Typically non-business in nature, bandwidth-intensive P2P applications have presented legal and security challenges to business organizations. Although business-critical P2P applications do exist, each application has its own bandwidth habits and performance requirements. Therefore, each needs its own appropriate performance management. A good performance management strategy requires the ability to identify P2P applications and control their bandwidth utilization.

Packeteer's application traffic management system identifies P2P applications and helps you define appropriate policy management strategies. These strategies can range from a total application block, to a small trickle of bandwidth, to immediate and first access to bandwidth. At the same time, the Packeteer system protects the business applications that share the network and its resources with P2P traffic.

Packeteer's Layer 7 traffic classification identifies applications running across your network - both business and non-business in nature. Whether they've tunneled through HTTP tunnel gateways or not, the Packeteer system discovers and tracks P2P applications like KaZaA, Morpheus, Gnutella, iMesh, and AudioGalaxy. It is this Layer 7 monitoring that enables Packeteer to counter P2P's port-hopping tendencies, distinguishing it from ill-equipped routers and firewalls. Once P2P traffic is identified, Packeteer applies decisive policy controls that eliminate or minimize P2P's presence on the network. You can block P2P, contain it to a reasonable bits-per-second rate, and/or limit each user to a maximum. You can even discourage usage and avoid blocking by providing P2P with such a small trickle of bandwidth that users experience dismal performance and refrain from using the applications completely. While the Packeteer system controls P2P traffic, it allocates appropriate amounts of bandwidth to business applications to ensure efficient and reliable performance.

Sluggish Web Content

Web traffic ranges from mission-critical applications such Citrix' Nfuse and Oracle's WebForms, to e-commerce, to recreational web browsing. Slow, inconsistent web performance can undermine productivity, revenues, partnerships, and pleasant dispositions.

A variety of factors impact web performance:

• Critical applications can lose the bandwidth battle to less urgent traffic such as large email attachments, file transfers, or Napster.
• Access-speed disparity between dial-up and broadband users, known as the last-mile problem, makes slow-speed users suffer.
• The last-mile problem forces organizations to author multiple versions of content to address speed disparity.
• Encryption and decryption cause a precipitous drop in connections per second for secure online transactions.

Packeteer's PacketShaper solution brings prompt, predictable, efficient performance to web-based applications.

The PacketShaper Solution

PacketShaper separates the web's assorted traffic types from each other and from other applications' traffic. Then they allocate each category the bandwidth required for appropriate performance. Per-application policies can protect traffic, contain it, prevent large sessions from unfairly impacting others, and pace all traffic for optimum efficiency.

In addition, PacketShaper measures application response times, allow you to set service levels, track actual performance against service-level goals, and generate performance-related reports.

Retransmissions

A network administrator rests comfortably in the knowledge that the network, at 70 percent utilization, has room to spare. But does it? How much of that 70 percent is real throughput and how much is devoted to retransmission of old data? And why are critical applications so slow?

Unfortunately, that 70-percent-utilization figure doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't show that a third of the traffic traversing an expensive WAN link is traversing that link multiple times. It also doesn't show that one particularly slow application's traffic is half retransmissions.

Retransmissions optimally should be as close to zero as possible. But when router queues deepen and cause dropped packets, retransmissions spike. When latency increases the frequency of timeouts, retransmissions spike. When a bursty IP network behaves precisely as designed under heavy loads, retransmissions spike. Buying bandwidth to support a high rate of retransmissions is a costly, wasteful mistake.

The Packeteer Solution

Packeteer's PacketShaper solution detects and solves the network-efficiency problem. They can reduce retransmissions, improve network efficiency, boost application performance, and help avoid expensive bandwidth upgrades.

The Network Efficiency graph was designed to expose the hidden cost of retransmissions. The graph shows the percentage of bandwidth wasted by retransmissions. It can focus on the traffic of interest: all traffic, an application, a subnet, a user, a server, or a web destination. For example, you might note that although your network efficiency is 95 percent for your network as a whole, it plunges to 55 percent for your company's web page.

PacketShaper not only detects high retransmission rates but also offer features to bring network efficiency to reasonable levels. Their flexible policies allow you to tune bandwidth allocation and response time. You can reserve or cap bandwidth, protecting or restraining applications as appropriate. If a bursty application swells, it swells to its own maximum without infringing on other applications' bandwidth. No critical applications are locked out, response times are reasonable, and timeouts decrease. No timeouts generate no retransmissions.