[unisog] Traffic Shapers

[Clarke Morledge]

On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Kaminski, Eryk G. wrote:

> I will need to procure a traffic shaper soon. I have it narrowed down to
> Packeteer and NetEqulizer. Besides the large difference in pricing, does
> anyone have any pro/cons for either device? I have heard Packeteer
> requires frequent fine tuning.

Eryk,

We recently conducted a bake-off between several traffic shaping vendors 
in hopes of upgrading from our current PacketShaper solution. 
Unfortunately, for Packeteer, they have not been as responsive to new 
feature requests as much as we would have liked.  Nor have they been able 
to address traffic shaping in a multi-gigabit environment.  The recent 
BlueCoat acquisition tells me that the PacketShaper product development 
has already pretty much peaked.

So if you are happy with what you like *currently* about how the 
PacketShaper works, then that would be a good choice (Don't know about 
NetEq).  But I would not expect a whole lot of future improvements in the 
traffic shaping technology from BlueCoat (I hope I am wrong -- we still 
use several PacketShapers).

The "fine tuning" with the PacketShaper has only been an issue for us 
whenever students find some new application (particularly games!) and 
Packeteer does not have a corresponding classification.

We also looked at Cisco's Service Control Engine (really complex to 
implement -- but probably works well in an all-Cisco shop), Procera's 
PacketLogic (very impressive, a suitable PacketShaper replacement for us), 
and Anagran's FlowRouter (the cheapest of the bunch, but no Deep Packet 
Inspection capability).

Clarke Morledge
College of William and Mary
Information Technology - Network Engineering
Jones Hall (Room 18)
Williamsburg VA 23187