I think I’m on my way to becoming a blogger. For the past year I only blogged when I had some extra free time, and to be honest, well, I didn’t really feel guitly when I’m a bit (or a lot) late. Blogging was mostly an activity that’s mostly useful to me, and sometimes a few of my readers.
I’m not going to bore you with the details, this is a whole different topic. But I feel obliged to explain being late, everytime.
Well, last Thursday I had to go travel to Dubai, UAE. You know, NY of the Middle East(?) It’s a great city, I mean really great. Except for snow and winter games, you can expect almost anything in Dubai; it’s a huge bowl of mixed cultures.
I arrived at about 10:00PM Dubai’s time and went straight to my hotel room. My company reserved a room for me at Capitol Hotel in Mina Road (in case you’ll ever need a place to crash). It’s not a 5-star hotel, but it’ll do for a week. I’d rather save up for some tourism than to stay at a $$$ hotel, but it’s still a bit on the luxurios side. Thanks God they have a gym on the roof top, trust me, Dubai makes you gain weight like crazy.
I just wish I came here only for pleasure, but it isn’t the case this time. I’m mainly here to attend a course on “operating” the PacketShaper! Sounds fancy, huh? Let me repeat that, “The PacketShaper! Sounds fancy huh?”. If you ever heard of Packeteer you’ll know what I’m talking about. Basicaly, it’s a device that operates on all 7 OSI layers and manages bandwidth, filtering, and QoS. I think the marketing pitch got into me, because I’m starting to really like it.
What makes PacketShaper really good is that it starts operating on the Ethernet level (although you can manager fiber too, but that’s not the usual case) up to the application level, this includes managing services like HTTP, POP, SMTP, and many many others. It can discover just about any service known to a netadmin and set policies based on any piece of information in any of the 7 layers, think about setting policies by MAC, VLAN ID, protocol (IP, IPX, AppleTalk, SNA), MPLS, TOS, and by service, it can perfectly recognize (and limit) P2P applications or network games, and even recognize them by name! Yep, it knows Kazaa and BitTorrent just as well as Quake, HalfLife and Unreal Tournement. I can’t get my head wraped around the possibilities.
So umm… oh yeah, policies. Imagine you have a huge corporate network where you want to make sure that absolutely every Citrix connection gets at least 20k while making sure that FTP never spikes, Slashdot can’t bring you down, you’re banking account is always accessible even if some lazy-butt someone is downloading anime on eMule and trying to eat up all the left bandwidth, critical (but less bandwidth-hungry) CRM still has a higher priority, and you’re still able to handle link failures and automatically switch policies when the main router says “Ooops, my ADSL link is down, but I managed to get ISDN up and running, you wanna do something about that?!”.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention reporting. If you’re not looking for shaping and network improvments, but just want to know what’s going on in there, you could simply install PacketShaper as a monitoring and reporting device, you’ll be surprised by how many applications are running in your network and eating up your precious bandwidth. PacketShaper gives you all sorts of cool graphs, like network effeciency (per link, per application, per protocol, etc.), sent/recieved data, link utilization, peaks and spikes, and lots and lots of data that you can use to diagnose your network, I just love this product. These statistics are stored in a 1-minute resolution, and older data is stored in 15-minute resolution. So next time you have a slow network, you’ll know where trouble is coming from, it can be the server guys, the network cables, or just lack of bandwidth. One more thing about PacketShaper’s reporting capabilities, if you’ve got more than one PacketShaper installed, you can setup a central storage server and gather all reporting data using that single server. And just in case your annoying customer asks for a monthly report that he’ll never be able to understand, you can download an offline Word file filled with grahics, that should be enough to make you look smart.
For the Linux geeks out there, PacketShaper can talk to syslogd
and send events and alerts in case something goes wrong. Remember the last time
you had that SYN attack? Well now PacketShaper can send you an email, tell
syslogd about it, and switch policies just as soon as it happens.
And if that wasn’t enough, you use the XML API and query just about any piece
of information using HTTP? It’s not REST or Ajax, but it’ll do.
Those are just little headlines for what it can do, if I was to talk more about it, I’m guessing I’ll never stop, or maybe won’t know where to start. If your really important network still doesn’t have one of those babies, you shouldn’t think twice, just go and get yourself a PacketShaper.