Optenet Enables Service Providers to Extend Bandwidth Monitoring and Control Services

(01/12/2008)

Optenet has enhanced its content security solution to include new bandwidth optimisation functionality. Optenet Bandwidth Management (OBM) offers service providers a sophisticated management tool that enables highly granular, real-time network traffic control. The bandwidth optimisation functionality can be utilised by service providers within their own networks and can also be offered to enterprise customers as a service.

With Optenet’s bandwidth management capability, service providers and enterprises can limit the resources consumed by a connection, an IP address, or a traffic group, and can reduce network congestion caused by increasingly popular practices such as streaming video and downloading large multimedia files.

Unlike traditional bandwidth optimisation solutions that indiscriminately block all bandwidth-intensive applications within a corporate firewall, OBM uses Optenet’s unique filtering and granular categorisation technology to balance resource utilisation. This allows service providers and enterprises to prioritise critical traffic flow by temporarily disabling non-essential traffic when network usage thresholds reach pre-defined levels.

“In order to ensure performance for all business processes it’s critical for both enterprises and service providers to control their network traffic in real-time,” said Javier Peralta, Sales Director for Optenet in the UK. “When businesses add new, bandwidth-intensive applications, like VoIP and Web conferencing, or expand their services in other ways, prioritising traffic for these applications that require such high-quality connectivity is of the highest importance.”

The new OBM tool is highly customisable and enables service providers and enterprises to define global, regional, business unit, workgroup and/or individualised control thresholds for their customers’ network traffic.

Network administrators using Optenet’s OBM technology can:
• Set bandwidth usage policies by user, group, work role, network and time of day;
• Create upstream and downstream traffic limits, which deny new bandwidth requests when the total traffic exceeds a predefined threshold; and
• Create application-specific usage limits, which deny new requests from specific applications, particularly non-business related applications, when the total bandwidth usage exceeds a predefined threshold.

When a bandwidth threshold is reached, OBM automatically deactivates new requests until bandwidth demand falls below that threshold. This safeguard does not affect previously established connections.

“Competing security solutions can be restrictive and lack of intelligent network bandwidth management can create slow-moving application performance,” Peralta continued. “By utilising Optenet’s technology to prioritise policies, enterprises can ensure that enough bandwidth is available for business-driving applications to function properly.”

Related topics:  Data management and data security 

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