Packeteer PacketShaper System Architecture

Packeteer's "intelligent overlay" of WAN application optimization technologies bridges the gap between a diverse application environment and your IP network infrastructure.

Transparent Network-Application Overlay:

PacketShaper's unique system architecture is designed to serve as an intelligent overlay to your diverse application environment and IP network infrastructure—combining best-of-breed technologies for optimizing WAN application performance in a single appliance.

• Overlay to your existing infrastructure
• Combine best-of-breed technologies in a single appliance
• Deploy simply and flexibly
• Centrally manage for efficient operation
• Integrate into your management applications
• Enjoy high resilience and availability

Over Existing Infrastructure:

PacketShaper works as a transparent overlay to your existing infrastructure—requiring no changes to routing tables, application servers, firewalls or directories. Gain intelligence on network and application behavior through passive traffic flow monitoring—or deploy in-line and PacketShaper invisibly delivers QoS, compression and acceleration to create a high-quality user experience across the WAN and Internet.

One System; Many Best-of-Breed Components:

Packeteer collects all the rigorous technologies needed to optimize WAN application performance in a singular system—everything in one place, working together seamlessly.

• Application intelligence far beyond simple Layer 7—insight into all applications running on your network.
• The visibility of a network probe plus application intelligence plus application performance monitoring.
• Superior QoS capabilities. Simply cap, prioritize and provision applications running on the network to leverage the most sophisticated QoS technologies.
• Advanced, low-latency compression for instant increase in WAN capacity. Fit more users and sessions on a given link!
• High performance protocol and application acceleration to overcome protocol problems such as high latency, loss and congestion.

Appliance Deployed, Simply:

Mix and match Packeteer technologies on a PacketShaper appliance. Different models are available to meet different performance needs—from branch office to data center. Deployed on the LAN-side of the WAN or Internet router, PacketShaper can operate as an in-line bridge or passive out-of-line monitoring device.

Centrally Managed:

Management of larger installations is made easy with Packeteer tools designed to streamline deployment and operation. Collect, correlate, store and report network and application performance information across an entire network from a primary location. Also deploy units, provision policy, update unit software and monitor exceptions—simply and centrally.

Flexible Deployment Options:

Packeteer capabilities are packaged as keyed software modules—quickly upgraded without appliance replacement. Start with the Monitoring Module for visibility, offering Layer 7 Plus application intelligence, network and application performance monitoring.

Add Shaping for QoS control if you find you want to reclaim bandwidth from recreational applications or provision VoIP calls with per session bandwidth. Or add Compression to instantly enable low-latency, high-impact compression.

In a Single Appliance:

Only Packeteer offers this much value in a single appliance. Sure, there are point solutions that separately take on these capabilities, but only Packeteer brings them together in one device that is easy to deploy, upgrade, integrate and maintain—regardless of whether data flows in a hub and spoke environment, across an MPLS meshed framework or over a satellite.

Highly Resilient and Available:

High availability is a Packeteer priority. When WAN links fail to backup links, PacketShaper can automatically switch to a backup set of policies that match the needs of failover environments. PacketShaper is compatible with HSRP and VRRP high availability protocols in redundant topologies, and can be configured for redundant operation to mirror complete state information. During a system reboot, power-down or in an unlikely case of failure, PacketShaper interfaces will "fail to wire," using an external optical bypass for fiber interfaces.

Works with Your Management Applications:

In addition to PacketShaper's integrated management capabilities, you can integrate our system into your existing management applications—including SNMP- and XML-based APIs—and into any SNMP-based management system and most performance reporting packages. Also, Packeteer basic Flow Detail Records are compatible with any NetFlow v5 collectors and reporting applications.