Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 12 December 2006 10:25
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 2
Wide area network application optimisation specialist, Packeteer, has upgraded its technology to identify - and if necessary block - a wide range of IP video traffic that can negatively impact the performance of corporate networks.
The upgrades take the form of downloadable plug-ins for Packeteer's WAN optimisation appliances and include plug-ins able to identify Flash video streams from www.youtube.com, www.videogoogle.com, www.vids.myspace.com, www.abc.com, and www.espn.com; IP-based video including PPLive, (a free, peer-to-peer shareware for viewing online television program) and TVUPlayer that provides a viewer to TVUNetworks, featuring hard-to-find special-interest TV channels, international sports, lifestyle, news and favourite channels from around the world; and Podcast content readers for TVTonic, NewzCrawler, Juice, WinPodder and RSS-Radio.
"IT managers are waking their organisations up to the fact that there is an explosion in the variety, usage and impact of video-based recreational traffic," said Dr Jim Metzler, principal analyst with Ashton, Metzler & Associates. "Not only is corporate employee productivity being negatively impacted by engaging in leisure activities on company time, but the traffic they generate is sucking away precious bandwidth from critical customer service and transactional applications. The plug-ins being introduced by Packeteer will provide enormous help in measuring and containing the impact of this traffic on business operations."
Packeteer argues that, while probes have long been available to differentiate network traffic based on MAC, IP address and port numbers, the growing diversity of WAN applications is rendering this technology obsolete.
"There is one inescapable truth in WAN optimisation - in order to intelligently accelerate applications and control network behaviour, it is essential to have visibility into what is running on the network," said Mark Urban, director of product marketing with Packeteer.
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