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Warding off WAN Gridlock: Page 3 of 21

• Can you set policies per connection and per protocol?

• Is reporting available for the most active protocols and users?

Also, remember that performing traffic shaping costs CPU time, and your firewall may be overloaded before performing QoS.

Dedicated traffic shapers, on the other hand, move the overhead of QoS to a separate box and can offer granular control of bandwidth use. The QoS devices we tested support a wide range of speeds, and dedicated systems also have a higher limit on the number of policies you can set. This lets your traffic shaper grow with your WAN. Of course, there are benefits to integrated solutions, aside from price; for example, you're using a single management interface and want to have one less piece of infrastructure to take care of.

In the final tally, Packeteer and Allot ended up in first and second place, respectively, with the PacketShaper 4500 earning our Editor's Choice award. Sitara's solution also performed well but had a confusing interface. Lightspeed's Total Traffic Control has decent reporting capabilities, but its bandwidth control and management interface didn't measure up to those of its rivals. Radware's product is an add-on to its application switch and isn't as feature-rich as the other products we reviewed. However, if you own Radware switches, you can't beat the price.


The PacketShaper 4500 is a 2U rackmount box with two 10/100 Ethernet ports (you can add two expansion modules as well, for up to six ports). Packeteer's product offers the most granularity in setting policies, has an impressive classification engine, and has what we consider the best user interface. Although it has a command-line interface, most configuration is performed via a Web browser. And unlike all the other vendors, the browser interface is standard HTML, not a Java applet or Win32 application.