Few Institutions Need Network Control More Than Colleges
Packeteer for Higher Education. Because a Little Bit of Knowledge can be Dangerous.
It's the ideal antidote for overstuffing the pipes. PacketShaper, Packeteer’s Application Traffic Management appliance rescues campus WANs, keeping critical traffic moving effectively through bandwidth bottlenecks and preventing any single type of traffic from monopolizing the link.
P2P Out of Control. With a growing number of students downloading music and even setting up P2P servers in their dorm rooms, recreational traffic quickly can consume the bulk of the bandwidth at most universities and colleges.- Bursty Traffic. The bursty nature of IP networks means that an individual traffic flow can consume all available bandwidth. In a computer lab, the first few students to access the Web site easily can squeeze out the rest.
- Poor Return on Investment. Schools spend huge sums on state-of-the-art technology to enable new teaching techniques, collaborate with other campuses, automate administrative systems, and more –only to find that performance and effectiveness fall far short of expectations.
- Peaks in Network Usage. Managing multiple applications across the WAN is always a challenge. In K-12 schools, the challenge is that much greater as every student accesses the same on-line information in the same 50-minute period, and every teacher checks email during the same 10-minute break between classes.
- Instant Messaging and Greeting Cards. Finding and controlling these disruptive applications, often referred to as the modern way of passing notes in class, can mean the difference between productive and unproductive classes.
PacketShaper Puts You Back in Control
Packeteer’s PacketShaper puts educational institutions back in control, ensuring that applications and users get the bandwidth they need for predictable performance, increasing network efficiency, and reducing costs. PacketShaper achieves these results beaucoup ways:
- Layer 7 Classification and Control. Network managers can find and control recreational applications such as KaZaA and AudioGalaxy, which commonly jump from port to port or hide out on port 80, the http port. Router-based solutions don’t have the layer 7 intelligence needed to consistently find these mischievous applications.
Get a grip on P2P traffic the way the University of British Columbia did.
- Policies to Contain “Recreational” Traffic. Network managers can set a simple policy to limit P2P traffic to no more than 10 percent of the link.
- Policies to Ensure User Performance. Network managers can set per-flow caps to more fairly allocate bandwidth across multiple users. A single user will not be able to squeeze out other users.
- Policies to Ensure Application Performance. Network managers are able to set priority policies to give certain URLs higher priority than others – so that a bored student who is surfing can’t interfere with other students trying to access a Web-based lesson.
- PacketShaper Prevents Burstiness. Packetshaper’s proactive approach to managing bandwidth prevents congestion from occurring by controlling the rate at which end systems transmit data, thus reducing the impact bursty traffic has on WAN bandwidth.
