Blue Coat Lets PacketShaper Dig Deeper Into Traffic

Blue Coat Systems has launched a number of upgrades to its product portfolio, including the ability to provide network managers with greater insight into the type of traffic running across their networks, thanks to a software upgrade for its PackerShaper appliance.

The PacketShaper appliance has been around now for about 10 years. It has a healthy 10,000 customers (mostly very large to medium sized businesses as well as universities) with 50,000 appliances shipped globally.

PacketShaper is essentially a network box that sits in line with a business’s network traffic. It provides a deep level of visibility into the apps that cross the network and consume valuable bandwidth, including VoIP apps, enterprise software etc. It doesn’t look at the port level, it looks at the application level to automatically discover what applications are running on the network.

It can also track metrics, such as the response time of particular applications, the amount of bandwidth it is consuming, and it provides troubleshooting tools, as well as network control capabilities to ensure that the most important applications have the most bandwidth.

Portfolio Upgrades

Blue Coat has made three significant upgrades to its PacketShaper appliance and other products.

The first upgrade concerns an improvement to its high-end network appliance, with the introduction of Packetshaper 12000, which more than doubles the capacity of its previous high-end appliance (the Packertshaper 10000) by managing up to 3 Gbps of aggregate throughput for typical enterprise traffic.

The second upgrade concerns the enhancement of Blue Coat’s IntelligenceCenter, the central reporting platform for distributed PacketShaper appliances, which now features a 10-fold increase in data collection scalability and role-based access controls, to allow management to define specific roles and functions for network administrators.

But it is the third upgrade that has got the Blue Coat executives most excited. The software for all PacketShaper appliances that have a support contract is being upgraded from version 8.5 to 8.6, significantly ramping up in the software’s capabilities.

“We are especially excited about the software release as it a game changer,” admitted Dave Ewart, senior manager for product marketing (EMEA) at Blue Coat.

No Porn On My Watch

This sentiment was echoed by Steve House, senior director of product marketing and management for PacketShaper.

“The software release is really ground breaking, as we have tied PacketShaper into the WebPulse cloud service,” explained House, speaking to eWEEK Europe UK.

WebPulse essentially is a cloud database hosted in Blue Coat’s data centres around the world. It classifies new content as it arrives on the Internet, and has classified approximately 95 percent of the all the URLs around the world.

“WebPulse has 70 million people feeding into it, and Blue Coat receives eight billion tips per day,” said House. “This means that WebPulse has already identified all of the malware, porn, phishing URLs, so that it is easier for the network administrator to enforce their corporate policy. PacketShaper now categorises all content using WebPulse.”

Grey Areas

House explained that, in most organisations, there is a “grey area” of content, where applications that have traditionally been thought of as recreational are starting to used as business tools. “For example, organisations are now posting training videos onto YouTube, and are exploiting the power of Facebook and social networking in general,” he said.

But he pointed out that social networking websites and YouTube still contain many time wasting and non-work-related content, such as music videos or even Facebook games or chat functions.

While a lot of companies used to simply block all Facebook traffic on their networks, PacketShaper enables network administrators to sub-divide the network traffic and identify individual URLs. In this way, they can see which IP addresses are, for example, playing Facebook games, and block this particular URL.

No performance issues

As PacketShaper is an integrated solution, House insists there is absolutely no performance hit with PacketShaper using the WebPulse database.

“We are a networking box so we don’t slow anything down until we know what it is,” said House. “We have data centres with the WebPulse database located around the world.”

Prices for traffic shaping-and monitoring-featured PacketShaper appliances start at around £2,000.

Prices for the PacketShaper 12000 appliance start at the $55,000 (£37,800).

PacketShaper 8.6 is available now as a software upgrade for all customers with a current support contract for a PacketShaper appliance. Likewise, IntelligenceCenter 3 is avaialble now as a software upgrade for all customers with a current support contract for IntelligenceCenter.