Expand adds Layer 7 monitoring to WANs

Customers can upgrade existing WAN acceleration devices

Expand Networks has updated its wide area network (WAN) appliance platform with new features, including the ability to recognise and prioritise traffic for specific applications and a transparency mode to overcome difficulties with corporate firewalls.

Available immediately, Expand's new platform enables administrators to gain a better understanding of, and greater control over, the type of traffic passing over WAN links between different company sites, the firm said.

Major new features of the upgrade are a Firewall Transparency Mode (FTM) and Layer 7 application discovery, which is key for delivering quality of service (QoS) for critical applications, according to Expand's corporate vice president for sales and marketing, Adam Davison.

In particular, Davison explained that the rise of web-based applications has led to a lot of extra traffic that is difficult to separate into business and non-business applications.

"We've always had QoS built-in, but we've now moved away from just a little Layer 7 and Layer 4 support to full Layer 7. Plug it in, and it can tell you straight away that this is SAP traffic on the web port, for example," he said.

Applications such as Skype also hop from port to port, which means that an optimisation strategy based around specific ports is insufficient.

"We can follow Skype and optimise it because we see it as an application," Davison said.

Administrators can not only see what applications are operating across the WAN and block them if necessary, but apply policies to throttle their bandwidth or only allow them at specific times of the day, such as lunchtime or after hours.

Meanwhile, FTM mode addresses the problems caused by increasingly complex firewall configurations designed to protect corporate infrastructure, but which can have an undesirable affect on WAN optimisation, according to Expand.

In particular, application traffic can now be encapsulated using User Datagram Protocol in addition to IPCOMP, RTM or IPSec, Davison said.

The updated platform is available now as an upgrade for all of Expand Networks' current WAN optimisation hardware, including the 7900, 6900 and 4900 series. Customers with a maintenance agreement can get the new code for free.

Expand also announced the new 6850/6950 Datacenter Accelerator devices that have the new platform as standard.