A bandwidth-hungry Spur Corporation recently installed Packeteer`s award-winning PacketShaper, which now enables the organisation to monitor and manage all traffic across its WAN from its head office in Woodstock, Cape Town.
Adastra Technology Corporation commissioned the installation and is a preferred PacketShaper implementation partner for Thin Client Technologies (Pty) Ltd t/a IT Wise the sole distributor for Packeteer Inc. in Africa.
Says Adastra`s technical director, Ian Verhulp: "With the implementation of PacketShaper, we are able to guarantee bandwidth to Spur`s business-critical application traffic. In this case, Citrix ICA traffic, which is critical to Spur`s Accpac accounting system, is now guaranteed bandwidth, with much improved response times at branch level and database inconsistencies are now a thing of the past."
"Spur have a Wide Area Network, which links their remote branches and central kitchens to its head office in Woodstock. Various applications, such as emails, intranet and accounting systems are centrally located at Spur`s head office and used by its remote branches", explains Verhulp.
"All these applications obviously compete with each other for the limited and finite amount of available bandwidth, with some applications demanding more bandwidth than others, which in turn impacts on the functionality of other less bandwidth-hungry applications. Although low in bandwidth requirements, Citrix sessions are very time sensitive due to their interactive nature. When users were using applications that utilised much of the bandwidth as was available, the active Citrix sessions were compromised causing poor response at the client and inconsistencies in the accounting database", he continues.
Technical director for IT Wise, Pieter Olivier, explains that the PacketShaper is the ideal solution for Spur because the product has the ability to identify and manage various traffic types. In most cases critical application traffic is being slowed down by non-critical applications that are running on the network without anyone being aware of it. Thus, this non-critical application traffic is causing havoc on the network and is never managed nor controlled.
"With Packeteer`s PacketWise software these applications can now be identified from layers `two` up to `seven`. This identification is not only detected on port-type but is also identified by the application using the port. This means that dynamic ports are associated to the application they represent. The PacketShaper not only manages the bandwidth, it also manages the latency of each application across the Wide Area Network. This in turn improves the response times the PacketShaper can give to each group of applications.
"This identification, analysis and control function of the PacketShaper can be scheduled so that, for example, an organisation`s month-end requirements will get what is needed at such a critical time. Its ease of use puts the PacketShaper in its own class and network managers are no longer left in the dark as to wonder if their WAN is functioning efficiently and effectively," states Olivier.
Verhulp foresees that Spur will soon install other products from Packeteer, especially as they are planning to upgrade to faster WAN links and also considering additions to their existing WAN infrastructure.
Verhulp concludes: "The Packeteer product range is superb and I have not found any other product, which even remotely comes close to delivering what the PacketShaper is capable of."
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