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Warding off WAN Gridlock: Page 9 of 21

Lightspeed Systems Total Traffic Control 3.0



Lightspeed is the only vendor whose product we tested does not come on a standalone box; instead, it is installed on a Microsoft Windows 2000 server (in our case, a Dell PowerEdge 1650). Even including the price of the server, this product is one of the least expensive devices tested. However, it's also the most limited and has a confusing management interface.

To start, we had to draw our network. We dragged and dropped icons and connection points on a grid, similar to creating a Visio map. We needed to add icons for internal and external NICs, a filter to sort and analyze the traffic, and a queue to throttle the bandwidth. Fortunately, wizards and sample configurations are provided, but this interface is not intuitive and will have you scratching your head for a few hours.

Management is performed via a Windows program, and you can administer on console or remotely. Bandwidth shaping is done by defining a series of three priorities, with each priority getting a percentage of bandwidth, or by CBQ. We could create as many as eight classes and assign a total percentage of bandwidth and maximum delay. We could even control whether we wanted classes to borrow available bandwidth from other classes. All controls are based on source and destination IP addresses or port range. There is also integration with spam filtering.

In small environments where you know which programs will be running, this product could be sufficient. However, there are no guaranteed-bandwidth-per-session controls. We could only apply filters based on a whole class level, which meant no guaranteed rate per connection.