Blue Coat Enhances PacketShaper for Application Accountability

Advancing its Application Delivery Networking strategy, Blue Coat released new software that enables its PacketShaper appliances to provide more granular application visibility, enhanced application intelligence and policy-based control over traffic flowing between an enterprise network and WAN.


Application accountability enables businesses to better assure the quality of bandwidth-hungry business-critical applications and communication, including telephony and video conferencing, while controlling usage of progressively more taxing recreational applications. The new PacketShaper 8.5 release uses integrated workflows to enable more detailed application understanding with real-time monitoring, historical reporting and policy-based QoS controls. Unlike conventional security appliances and filters that isolate WAN traffic by port type, Blue Coat said its appliance analyzes traffic flow to detect specific applications that may appear as general Port 80 or HTTPS traffic. Similar applications can be automatically grouped together in class of service categories, such as peer-to-peer (P2P), games or instant messaging, for ease of management. In addition, PacketShaper appliances now provide more granular visibility and control over voice, video and virtualized applications.

Based on more detailed application visibility, application accountability provides enhanced quality for important applications, including voice, video and real-time sessions. Blue Coat's appliance also manages applications to allotted bandwidth consumption and prevents them from impinging on the performance of other applications due to unexpected surges or changes in behavior.


In addition, the new PacketShaper 8.5 release adds the capability to specifically identify and manage network traffic from VMware View Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications on a granular basis. PacketShaper appliances, with this new software release, can prevent VDI set-up and downloads from temporarily dominating WAN capacity.
http://www.bluecoat.com