Overview
VistaOne’s Blue Coat Evaluation Program (VEP-Packetshaper for short) affords a maximum 30-day no-risk approach to properly assessing the value of Blue Coat packet shaping and/or intelligent caching appliances in your network infrastructure. To support the VEP-PacketShaper, VistaOne provides all Blue Coat hardware and software, plus as many as ten hours of Blue Coat Certified Engineer (BCCE) expertise, at no charge. Your organization is under no obligation to place an order for hardware or anything else subsequent to the VEP-Packetshaper.VEP Packetshaper
Upon receipt of your scope of work submittal, VistaOne’s BCCE will contact you to finalize an installation date (see Section II below) and to establish procedures for remote access to PacketShapers and/or Proxy SG devices. The installation date should coincide with a 5-10 day period that best allows you to invest approximately ten hours to work with our engineer evaluating the Blue Coat equipment for potential purchase.
Process
1. VistaOne ships and you receive the Blue Coat appliances and related installation materials approximately one week prior to an installation date.
2. VistaOne schedules two hours to complete physical installation and deliver an overview demonstration of appropriate Blue Coat interfaces and feature sets. We conduct this session via telephone and web- conference. Installation is typically in-line requires less than one minute of network interruption.
For PacketShaper Evaluations
3. At installation, the PacketShaper will be set to "Auto-Discover" (classify) applications running on your network. Testing continues in classify-only (no shaping) mode for five consecutive days following the install.
4. During the five day classify-only period, a VistaOne BCCE reviews the application mix and existing network performance to establish current-state baselines using remote access. A scheduled web conference at the end of day five reviews baseline findings and seeks your concurrence. In this conference, you’ll strategize and implement packet shaping on a representative group of applications with the goal of mitigating congestion and optimizing performance.
5. Days six through ten are dedicated to observing the effects of shaping on the representative applications and making adjustments where required.
6. With shaping now turned off, VistaOne uses days eleven through fifteen to complete and present post-shaping performance reports to contrast with the previously created baseline performance reports. These reports provide hard evidence for a purchase decision.
7. The PacketShaper VEP-Packetshaper can be extended for up to ten days where shaping delivers gains from bandwidth compression and/or TCP acceleration. A process similar to the above demonstrates pre and post results.