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Warding off WAN Gridlock: Page 8 of 21

Guaranteeing Bandwidth

The QosWorks policy screen let us see guaranteed bandwidth by bytes and percentage, burst amount, and priority amongst all the classes. Within a class, bandwidth is allocated evenly to each connection. Our streaming movie played fine without setting any QoS rules, even with 100 Web users. The devices from Allot and Packeteer let video get trampled when there were no policies set. Sitara's QoSWorks also supports HTTP caching from an external cache server.

We weren't thrilled by the reporting features QoSworks offers. In the policy report, we could see the bandwidth currently in use by each policy, its burst size and a thermometer showing how much of the allocated bandwidth was in use, but these are shown only as averages over the last 5, 15 and 30 minutes. Graphs for events past a half-hour are in the "historic reports" panel. Here you can see throughput or packet count for application, IP address, IP ToS (Type of Service) bits or by policy. That's the extent of the graphing.

Sitara has a decent product, but the management interface really drags it down, and it's overpriced by at least $5,000.

QoSWorks QWX-10000, $19,995. Sitara Networks, (888) 748-2720, (781) 487-5900. www.sitaranetworks.com