The Cupertino, California-based developer already offers monitoring, QoS and compression for data traffic on the devices, with the optimization and acceleration module being the result of last year’s acquisition of Mentat Inc, whose SkyX technology it has since been selling as a separate appliance.
As the product’s name suggests, Mentat sold SkyX primarily into the satellite networking world for accelerating transmissions over the very long distances there, but we’ve found it to be useful on lower-latency links too, said Mark Urban, Packeteer’s director of product marketing. The Application Acceleration Module, which essentially offers TCP and HTTP acceleration, starts at $250 list for one or two 2Mbps links and scales, on the highest-end PacketShaper device, up to $10,000 for an OC-3/STM-1 link (i.e. 155Mbps).
The other enhancements to the firmware are included as part of the base functionality of the platform and will thus be covered by a standard support contract. They are the ability to monitor SLA and quality (i.e. jitter, delay and packet loss) on voice and video traffic, as well as compression capabilities for the same flows. The issue for the former, was applying Packeteer’s existing monitoring capability to the UDP and RTP protocols used for voice and video. For the compression part, this does not relate to the codecs, which are already compressed, but rather to the RTP, UDP and IP headers that precede the payloads in both voice and video transmissions, which can be compressed for greater efficiency.
Urban said that, while there are a number of other companies in the dedicated monitoring space whose technology extends to voice and video, nobody else in optimization/acceleration is offering voice and video monitoring, and while some in that market do header compression, we’re the only ones who can find, measure, monitor, apply per-call QoS provisioning and now monitor SLAs and compress headers for voice and video.
