De re Bandwidth Management...

Being a small treatise given at the GLITTER conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in March of 2008. Herein I describe our use of dynamic subpartitions for each IP address in our Resnet space, with extra classes to grant special treatment (some good, some bad) to aggressive or fragile traffic types. This presentation describes both Packeteer and Procera Packetlogic configurations.

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A small presentation on the Procera Packetlogic given at OARTech in February of 2009. This is an overview, followed by a live demo of Oberlin's system which can't be reproduced here.

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Comparing the Procera Packetlogic and the Blue Coat (nee Packeteer) Packetshaper:

There are many differences in configuration and approach used by these two devices. The Packetlogic primarily works by queuing packets through the device, and is very fast about it. One can build shaping rules for minimizing latency, for example. The Packetlogic (software version 11) has network objects, service and protocol objects, firewall and shaping objects, all of which are strung together into shaping or firewall rules which govern the traffic flow through the box.

The Packetshaper (Packetwise software version 8.3), now owned by Blue Coat, manipulates traffic by adjusting window sizes and other TCP/IP parameters to prioritize and partiion traffic by type. It identifies many traffic classes, and permits one to group these classes, partition or prioritize them, and has extensive reporting capability, besides.

At Oberlin, we strive to contain the impact of Peer-to-Peer applications on our network, and we also carve out a little protected space for "fragile" applications like Skype and other voice/video/chat traffic and online game-play. In particular, these applications are sensitive to latency and jitter, and we try to limit that. Interesting then, is this comparison of the particular game and P2P applications identified by each device, using the more current documented information from each at the time I write: