Stories about: Packeteer

As you may have suspected from some of my prior columns, I've found the product strategies in the WAN optimization market something of a puzzle.

When Rich De Brino agreed to let a start-up come on-site and demonstrate how its technology could optimize video applications by aggregating multiple network connections, he didn't make it easy on the vendor.

Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever - a box able to optimize, de-duplicate, compress and encrypt 1Gbit/s of WAN traffic.

Just when it seemed as if a truce might be feasible, fighting has flared up again in the battle between the WAN optimisation vendors over just who can - or can't - accelerate the latest AutoCAD format for drawing files.

Security and wide-area network acceleration company Blue Coat Systems has made a deal to buy Packeteer, a longtime WAN optimisation vendor, for about $US268 million.

Network admins have spent many a late night trying to figure out how to improve application response or file replication across the WAN. Faster performance is all about bigger pipes, right?

Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we've been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.

Cisco and Microsoft this week said they intend to work together to offer support for Windows Server 2008 on Cisco's WAN optimization products for branch offices.

Packeteer Networks in a few weeks will be coming out with a faster generation of its traffic-shaping gear that eventually will reach 20Gbps throughput and perform more complex traffic analysis.

Packeteer is introducing a new management platform that draws data from its own and other vendors' gear to boost the performance of applications over the WAN and is the first step in a broader application-performance plan.

Storing large project files separately in its 20 offices worked fine for environmental engineering firm GEI Consultants until employees with different specialties had to start collaborating on jobs.