Policy-based Application Traffic and Bandwidth Management Solution

Packeteer's PacketShapter 6500 series promises predictable and efficient performance of wire-speed Internet-based applications.

by Wayne Kawamoto

Packeteer (NASDAQ: PKTR) recently announced its PacketShaper 6500 series, a 100Mbps addition to the company's PacketShaper product line. The PacketShaper 6500 system is designed to meet the needs of large enterprises and service providers by allowing high-capacity, wire-speed application traffic and bandwidth management on IP networks.

PacketShaper is a policy-based application traffic and bandwidth management solution that promises predictable, efficient performance to applications running over enterprise WANs and the Internet. It's designed to discover and classify application traffic on the network, analyze its performance, enforce bandwidth allocation and quality of service, and generate reports on service levels

"The PacketShaper 6500 series directly addresses the needs of enterprises and service providers who require wire-speed application traffic control and IP bandwidth provisioning for large numbers of simultaneous connections at the WAN and data center edges," said Jeff Barker, director of product marketing for Packeteer.

"With the addition of the 6500 series, Packeteer delivers effective bandwidth management and application quality of service at the right price and performance level for each point in the network, from remote sites to the data center." According to Neil MacDonald, a vice president and research director of Gartner, "We see the need for bandwidth management in two primary areas, for protecting and prioritizing traffic on slower connections at the edge of a wide area network, and for protecting and prioritizing traffic for data centers where large numbers of users are concentrated.

While the former need has been addressed by products in the past, the latter, until now, has largely been ignored. We see that these types of high volume data centers, whether they be within a large enterprise, applications service provider hosting facility or a network service provider, will benefit from this type of technology as the need to deliver against contractually-defined service levels increases."

Pricing and availability
The PacketShaper 6500 will be available in both standard and ISP editions later this month. U.S. list prices will range from $17,000 to $34,000.

The products will be sold worldwide through Packeteer's distribution, reseller, service provider and partner channels.

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