WAN optimisation vendor Packeteer upgraded its PacketShaper appliance firmware today. The product could appeal to firms increasing the demands on their networks and moving to converged voice and data systems, especially if they wish to delay upgrades to WAN bandwidth.

Mark Urban Packeteer's product marketing director, said, "The main features are the integrated application Acceleration Module; service-level agreement [SLA] provision for voice and video traffic, which also applies to MPLS WAN services; and thirdly new voice-compression capabilities for customers wanting to increase their voice capacity [over IP] without hardware upgrades."

Packeteer's new Acceleration Module uses new capabilities it calls Xpress TCP, Xpress HTTP and Xpress XML acceleration. This could speed up big jobs such as file transfers, database syncs, and server backups, said Urban. "Anything that's very bandwidth-intensive or is constrained by network latency - this module helps to overcome latency and protocol design issues," he added

Version 8.0 upgrades Packeteer's existing compression module, adding new voice compression and packing capabilities to reduce the overhead in voice/video packets, so that UTP, UDP and IP headers are not needed for all the voice traffic on the network. "We can take voice/video samples from across many calls in a small time segment – compress the headers and put them in a 'super-packet' which reduces network traffic between 30 and 50 percent.” said Urban.

The firmware upgrade will be generally available in May and the new application acceleration module will be the only item that costs extra, starting at £140 + VAT. The voice SLA tracking improvements are free for customers with current support contracts as are the compression improvements for all those with compression enabled on their PacketShaper appliances.