Blue Coat Packetshaper

Blue Coat PacketShaper

The Blue Coat PacketShaper is a bandwidth management device that is extremely useful while being highly professional and not losing its simplicity. It has an easy and user friendly interface that can be of a benefit to any organization from low-end to expert users.

Blue Coat PacketShaper delivers visibility and control throughout your WAN to enhance the application monitoring and performance for all users across networks of enterprises in any location. This application will suit all network speed links with its lowest level box being for a 128k line and the high-end box able to manage and monitor a 1 Gigabit link.

This system is combined in one appliance with numerous software choices that deliver:

• Monitor 600+ applications with Layer 7 Plus network visibility;
• Shape traffic in real-time with flexible policy-based QoS control;
• Accelerate and compress applications for maximum performance;
• Deploy and control multiple units with centralized management and reporting

Revolutionizing the way businesses work thanks to the consistency upon wide-area networking and the Internet to back strategic objectives, and in some cases even allowing businesses to survive, Blue Coat PacketShaper can enhance the control and performance of your WAN. Companies nowadays have to cope with the expanding range of applications, users and desktop power and also cope with reducing visibility, control and predictability which makes PacketShaper perfect for managing all these things.

WAN and Internet performance problems that effect all networks are now in the past because PacketShaper’s traffic shaping technology effectively controls all these things for you. Administrators can now easily accomplish crucial tasks in the time that PacketShaper saves by preventing network blocks, shaping bandwidth expenditure and controlling application performance with fewer performance-related complaints and an advanced Quality of Service (QoS) for all network users. Using PacketShaper means that the constant cycle of bandwidth upgrades is no longer necessary, it optimizes application throughput all the way through your current network infrastructure

Graphing is made easy with PacketShaper's graphing abilities, it’s easier to track down any older data from the “straight out of the box” system. The graphs are clear and simplified and are shown in forms of either pie charts or line graphs, though, of course, it is possible for your data to be demonstrated as raw data, making it easier to transfer it to other programs.

With minimal configuration, PacketShaper comes with basic step-by-step instructions comprising of IP addresses, passwords, connection speed etc. Physical installation is beyond easy and once it is on the network it can be entered via your web browser and can be configured either by a secure http connection or by a normal http connection.

PacketShaper, apart from doing all the things above, helps recognise when the PCs network has unauthorised traffic or the PCs are infected. Attacks from internal worm infections and rouge servers, unauthorised recreational traffic can damage network capacity and bring down very important applications, which is, at least, frustrating. PacketShaper protects the performance of critical applications and in addition to that it protects network performance during attacks while delivering hard ROI from increased WAN capabilities bandwidth savings and accelerated application performance.

Blue Coat PacketShaper is useful for weighing up MPLS and IP VPNs performance which are advantageous for connecting spread locations, tracking down and marking application traffic with individual handling requirements so traffic can move easily to the enterprise edge. Advantages of having MPLS and IP VPNs will not be noticed if applications are oversubscribed, critical applications are inappropriately designated to best-effort classes and traffic stalls in bottlenecks. This is where PacketShaper shows its professionalism.

Bluecoat PacketShaper has even more capabilities: Since installation of IP Telephony (IPT) and Voice/Video over IP (VoIP) effects every network in a different way and is different in each company, a successful implementation depends on guaranteed bandwidth and QoS, and also fitting more calls onto a restricted WAN resource. PacketShaper controls Crucial IPT protocols, delivering WAN capacity and true QoS functionality to guarantee the highest quality end-to-end communication for each call.

Uniting servers from remote sites to centralized ones is a common task, although additional traffic loads need accurate monitoring, classification and shaping before benefits can be reached. PacketShaper will help you out once again. It will find and control common traffic (CIFS, VoIP, CRM, Web and P2P) while also tracking Microsoft’s underlying CIFS changes in R2.

With minimal configuration, Blue Coat PacketShaper will become a crucial tool in keeping the network secure and also managing  and controlling bandwidth across your network.