Blue Coat Systems Inc. is laying out a vision it calls the application delivery network to describe what its stable of acceleration, traffic shaping and security gear can do together.
The announcement comes as the company upgrades its Blue Coat PacketShaper and Blue Coat IntelligenceCenter management software to better integrate its traditional products with PacketShaper gear it bought when it purchased Packeteer last year.
The integration enables data about traffic flows and application performance that is gathered by PacketShapers to be shared and manipulated by IntelligenceCenter. The information can be used to produce custom performance reports or to trigger alarms or automatically adjust traffic priorities in response to actual performance.
So if PacketShaper finds that a particular high-priority application is performing below a set level, IntelligenceCenter can enforce policies to reassign bandwidth and produce better response times for that application, according to Blue Coat President and CEO Brian Nesmith. These policies can be set through a new Application Performance Dashboard from which customers can also monitor application performance.
The software for PacketShaper also includes a plug-in that lets customers create profiles for their custom applications so the appliances can identify them and deliver specified priority and bandwidth.
The heart of the application delivery network consists of application visibility via PacketShaper, acceleration via ProxySG appliances, and security via ProxyAV appliances and the company’s WebFilter software.