About Layer7.comm™

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Layer7 is a Certified Packeteer Solution Partner in South Africa who specialise in application and network optimisation using Packeteers PacketSeeker and PacketShaper technology. WAN optimization and WAN performance across any wide area network topology regardless of whether it be Frame Relay, point to point or MPLS have proved to be the product of choice for many companies in South Africa and around the world. Layer7 maintains the Packeteer Solution Partner Status by complying with all the stringent requirement laid down by Packeteer.

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An Overview of Application Optimisation

In the arena of bandwidth optimization technology such as Peribit Corp. Expand Networks, Inc. Allot, Sitara and at the extreme low-end of the market for example AstroFlowGuard sold in South Africa. The success of Packeteer, Inc. "next-generation" application acceleration and traffic shaping solutions has to date out-performed their competition by applying their philosophy of a bottom up approach as opposed to a top down method to controlling applications which consume bandwidth. Often WAN and internet bandwidth consumption is not clearly understood in terms for what is consuming it, at any particular time, especially during critical production hours. Bandwidth demands seem to continuously increase without any particular reason, other than more people are using more bandwidth more often. Using Packeteer's, PacketShaper PacketSeeker and Xpress (Compression) technology which combines Layer 7 classification , traffic shaping and application intelligent acceleration to help users get the most efficiency out of their expensive WAN links and to ensure that mission-critical applications get the bandwidth they need.

Compared to their competition PacketShaper optimises bandwidth hungry congested WAN links far better in terms of its feature rich functionality by identifying and controlling each application in isolation to one another. To alleviate network congestion the idea of simply compressing data employed by Peribit and Expand do not always benefit business critical applications. Rouge un controlled applications such as P2P ( Peer to Peer ) Kazaa , eDonkey, Bit Torrent, Limewire, Slimeware, eMule, Napster, Sharezar, Bearshare, iMesh, Gnutella, and PeerEnabler hog precious resources which can be simply discarded or minimised. IM ( Instant Messenger ) applications the likes of which are Microsoft's MSN , Yahoo Messenger , AOL Messenger fall into this category.

Most technologies today such as Peribit, Expand, Allot, Sitara and even AstroFlowGuard employ rudimentary QoS ( Quality of Service ) or CBQ ( Class Based Queuing ) as opposed to Layer7 Bandwidth Management. Most routers and layer 3 and 4 switches today even support these features to some degree. CBQ is a traffic management algorithm developed by the Network Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as an alternative to traditional router-based technology. Now in the public domain as an open technology, CBQ is deployed by companies at the boundary of their WANs.

QoS or Quality of Service Prioritization has the ability to deliver data traffic with a minimum amount of delay in an environment in which many users share the same network. QoS should not be confused with CoS ( Class of Service ). CoS classifies traffic into categories such as high, medium, and low (gold, silver, and bronze). Low-priority traffic is "drop eligible," while high-priority traffic gets the best service. However, if the network does not have enough bandwidth, even high-priority traffic may not get through. Traffic engineering, which enables QoS, is about making sure that the network can deliver the expected traffic loads.

Packeteer's, PacketSeeker, PacketShaper , and Xpress technology offers the best of all these handling methods, with the distinguishing difference of application latency awareness. The method of Packeteer's technology to manage applications on a response time latency aware basis surpasses the competitors by offering network's the ability to firstly see their traffic profile in real-time, and the ability to change the completion of the traffic profile without affecting application response times.

Linux has come a long way in terms of free tools and network management applications built into the system, which has spawned the development of interesting products at the bottom end of the scale such as AstroFlowGuard, these Linux-based multi-function products built around public domain open source technologies incorporate bandwidth management functionality, statefull inspection firewall's, intrusion detection system, caching do not offer the robustness of purpose built appliance such as Packeteer . Support is limited for these products which also add to the complexity and cost of managing them.

Allot produce products under the branding of NetReality™ and WiseWan™ which have also come a long way in terms of their development, but not reached the acceptance of the market as a leading bandwidth management technology on the scale of that compared to Packeteer, Peribit and Expand. Sitara is also largely unheard of today and their market share has dwindled to a point of almost non-existence. The ability of these products to survive in today's fast-moving marked is uncertain.

Enterprise Caching which is the core concept behind Expands Bandwidth Acceleration technology is pretty much the same as Peribit's Network Sequence Mirroring™ ( NSM™ ) caching in essence. Both companies have their own patented algorithms to provide the caching efficiencies such as the elimination of repeat content, however the claims from Expand that a 400% throughput increase can be achieved is not disputed in the event that the same content is cached and not moved up and down the network over and over again, which is truly not reflective of actual network traffic. Molecular Sequence Reduction ( MSR ) compression from Peribit , identifies patterns in the traffic and in turn replaces them with a tag which is significantly smaller in cases than the actual data which the tag represents across the across the WAN. This is the similarity between the three dominating compression technologies on the market today.

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