Even though the costs of permanent connections to the Internet have declined with the advent of a more competitive telecomms environment, the cost of your connectivity is not negligible. The service you chose for your business was also a compromise between the ideal high throughput connection you would like and a slower option that would suffice.

However even on fast connections some applications will hog the bandwidth to the detriment of other services and the users of those services. And of course the applications that most commonly grab the lion’s share are the ones that least need it. For example we regularly find systems where connections for remote workers or field staff accessing vital services at headquarters are slowed to a crawl because the email system has decided it really needs ninety per cent of the bandwidth to download an attachment and everything else is just going to have to wait. This is more than just annoying - it’s inefficient and costly.

Fortunately there are ways that you can tame these unruly applications and allocate bandwidth resources on a more intelligent and efficient basis. Presence offers the Check Point FloodGate-1 software to complement systems that use Check Point firewall and VPN technology. For installations with other firewall gateways and implementations requiring additional processing capability to ensure adequate throughput the Packeteer family of PacketSeeker and PacketShaper products provide a range of solutions for medium and large local area networks and extensive wide area networks.

Check Point FloodGate-1

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Communication lines to the Internet only have a certain bandwidth capability; this means that the amount and speed at which traffic flows to and from the Internet is limited.  At certain times of the day large volumes of traffic can be expected and many companies experience Internet access difficulties, including problems caused by slow connections.  One solution to this problem would be to increase the bandwidth availability, this is a very costly solution and also inefficient because at other times during the day the line will be handling very small volumes of traffic.  A more cost effective solution is to implement bandwidth management software.  This gives priority to certain traffic at times of congestion.

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FloodGate-1 is a policy-based software solution, which controls the flow of inbound and outbound data packets at all WAN and Internet access points.   This product allows you to define what types of information are business-critical and gives this type of traffic priority over non-critical traffic. The administrator can set policy rules, which assign bandwidth privileges and controls based on the data packet’s classification.

Data packet classifications are typically based on the application they use, their source and their destination.

Bandwidth control criteria include:

Weighted priorities

This shows the relative importance between different classifications of packets.  For example a secure electronic commerce transaction may be deemed twice as important as catalogue browsing, therefore these two data packet classifications would be weighted at 2:1.

Guarantees

Certain types of data packets need bandwidth to be available to them at all times, with this in mind, FloodGate-1 allows rules to be set, which allocate a guaranteed bandwidth to certain packet classifications.

Limits

FloodGate-1 allows administrators to set limits on bandwidth usage for non-critical network applications.

Packeteer’s PacketSeeker and PacketShaper

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Packeteer’s PacketSeeker® is an application-intelligent traffic monitoring appliance that provides visibility of network utilization and application performance. Integrating transparently into your network, PacketSeeker identifies how WAN and the Internet resources are consumed, what causes performance problems, and provides a path to fix those problems.

Featured Highlights Include:

• Automatically discover traffic by leveraging Layer-7 classification and quickly identify the true nature of network traffic.
• Analyse traffic impacts and performance issues with link-bases statistics and 60+ metrics per application. Include peak utilization and efficiency measurements that are key indicators of performance issues.
• Benchmark and track application performance with Response Time Management (RTM) and TCP Health statistics. Pinpoint performance issues by evaluating network, client, and server behaviour trends to pinpoint performance issues.
• Proactively monitor service levels based on network or application statistics. Configure PacketSeeker to notify you when performance falls below configured thresholds, with ’rearm’ levels to avoid alarm overload.
• Report throughout your organization with on-board reporting, centralized reporting with ReportCenter, or integration via SNMP and XML APIs into your management applications.
• Upgrade to a PacketShaper with a software key to gain control over discovered performance problems with traffic shaping and policy control.

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PacketShaper® is an application traffic management system that monitors, controls, and accelerates application performance over the WAN & Internet. Integrating transparently into your network, PacketShaper delivers Quality of Service (QoS) for mission-critical applications and extends network resources.

Featured highlights include:

• Deliver business-critical applications reliably by controlling allocation of WAN and Internet resources through bandwidth management.
• Accelerate performance through compression of mission-critical applications with PacketShaper Xpress™.
• Automatically discover the true nature of traffic by leveraging Layer 7 classification
• Analyse traffic and benchmark performance with 60+ metrics per application.
• Delay or eliminate bandwidth upgrades by protecting resources for latency sensitive mission-critical applications.
• Contain the impact of unsanctioned traffic and smooth bursty applications with bandwidth maximums.

ReportCenter lets you leverage the powerful network utilisation and application performance statistics available from your Packeteer appliances. ReportCenter streamlines collection, collation, storage, analysis, and distribution of Packeteer statistics to lower ownership costs.

Featured Highlights Include:

• Get system-wide views across you entire WAN and Internet network. Arrange your locations into any hierarchy and aggregate performance information across groupings.
• Track high-level indicators of performance issues with link load measures, critical and marginal performance thresholds, event tracking and guaranteed rate failures.
• Drill down into detailed statistics or different device groupings to quickly isolate sources of problems.
• Scale to manage up to 500 PacketSeeker® and PacketShaper® appliances while maintaining fast analysis performance.
• Easily distribute reports throughout your organization via ReportCenter’s web portal delivery or through e-mail.
• Set access rights to different views of the network. Favorites page quickly brings users to relevant information.