Migrating to MPLS
Recommended Packeteer Products
Don't get caught in the MPLS spider web. Understand applications and optimize WAN performance with a new suite of tools.
The Challenge: Right Class of Service
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is meeting global acceptance—and deservedly so. Carriers get a more scalable, efficient infrastructure. Enterprises simplify their WAN. Yet Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs) routing challenges make it difficult to leverage the power of IP for advanced services.

Many Applications, Few Classes
MPLS leverages multiple classes of service. Voice gets assigned to highest class to ensure best performance. Casual Web browsing receives best effort. To properly assign what application—out of hundreds—gets assigned which class—out of a handful—demands accurate identification. Not so easy.
No Good Way to Sort
How do you sort through hundreds of business, recreational and "invisible" applications? IP addresses and port numbers fall short. Using router ACLs to map applications to class of service threatens the performance and stability of the critical routing infrastructure.
QoS Not Guaranteed
In MPLS, there's no way to manage inbound rates—two servers sending to a single branch can oversubscribe an inbound link. Even class assignment doesn't guarantee same class-level performance. Too many voice packets, for example, cause congestion at the LAN-WAN transition point. Overwhelming a voice class forces drops or lower class assignment, risking performance.
More Issues, Tools and Costs
Point products are popping up to deal with the growing complexity, increased bandwidth demand and WAN applications delivery. A probe for monitoring. QoS to manage bandwidth allocation. Compression and acceleration devices to enlarge capacity and speed performance. Deciding which or what to use poses a burden on IT staff and budget.
Great PVC Loss
The reduction of point-to-point PVCs removes a basic management construct and undermines the power and meshed connectivity of IP. Transitioning to a single or few PVCs per site forfeits the critical ability to allocate bandwidth between sites, measure SLAs and availability and troubleshoot issues.
The Packeteer Solution: See the Light
Get or maintain complete application visibility, guarantee end-to-end QoS and user experience. Get what you pay for and pay only for what you need.
Assess and Plan Capacity Needs
To prepare for a migration to MPLS services, you have to understand your network and application environment. Leverage Packeteer's Layer 7 Plus technology to identify and measure the applications running on your network, helping to determine:
- What applications run on your network
- What applications are taking how much bandwidth
- How much capacity is needed for each class of service
- How different classes of service perform
Assign Proper Class of Service
After you design and implement your MPLS service, you have to operate it. Once again, leverage Packeteer's Layer 7 Plus classification technologies to differentiate traffic and use Packeteer's policy framework to mark packets with the proper DiffServ, ToS or VLAN tag to get them into your carrier's class of service.
Deliver End-to-End QoS
Packeteer enhances the carrier Class of Service (CoS), improving the end-to-end QoS expected by users. Allocate inbound bandwidth, provide per session guarantees, and, most importantly, take advantage of Layer 7 Plus intelligence to validate and separate network traffic into actual applications.
Increase WAN Capacity, Not Bandwidth
Advanced compression algorithms provide low-latency, high-impact compression to increase WAN capacity and create room for business critical applications. No bandwidth upgrades required!
Protect Availability
Suppress DDoS, virus and worm propagation. Weed out security threats through Packeteer's Distributed Threat Suppression. Identify and isolate infected hosts, mitigating network impact. Our Flow Detail Records provide a detailed repository for forensic and compliance purposes.
Optimize WAN Applications
Discover applications, track network utilization, monitor application performance, ensure QoS, increase capacity through compression and accelerate applications—all in a single appliance—to deliver business applications over the WAN.
Blue Coat has acquired Packeteer, a leading provider of intelligent WAN Optimization solutions. Blue Coat ProxySG is and will remain our strategic product offering for WAN Optimization. We will continue selling PacketShaper, IntelligenceCenter and PolicyCenter and invest heavily in development to revitalize the PacketShaper technologies and feature sets and integrate those into the Blue Coat ProxySG product line.
Sales of Packeteer iShared, iShaper, SkyX and Mobiliti products will be discontinued on July 16, 2008.
More details can be found at bluecoat.com/packeteer
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Related Resources
Enhancing MPLS Network Performance
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