The Converged Traffic Manager appliance line from Converged Access provides the ability to identify and manage WAN traffic flows, to ensure that traffic that is particularly sensitive to traffic delays--such as VoIP or video--receives higher traffic priorities than lower priority business communications. Out of the box, the appliances are able to automatically identify, monitor and manage over 1400 protocols and applications, including VoIP codecs, audio/video transmissions, database communications, and application communications such as FTP, DNS, LDAP, SMTP, SNMP, Telnet, TFTP, POP2, POP3, etc.

The vendor's Converged Compression Appliance (CCA) line, announced in the summer of 2005 and which provided a subset of the CTM capabilities focused on traffic compression, is no longer available.

Granular application performance policies can be applied and enforced, per session or per user. Various models of the appliance are available, with support for up to 500,000 data flows over WAN links of up to 250 Mb/sec. Some of the available bandwidth management methodologies supported by the appliance include Class Based Queuing, TCP Rate Shaping, Packet Size Optimization, and maximum queue delay control.

In addition to bandwidth management controls, the appliances additionally provide both compression and caching features for the acceleration of WAN traffic. The QoS and compression capabilities of the appliance operate independently; in that any application can be compressed, any application can be QoS-managed, and QoS policies can be applied to any stream compressed by the appliance. Compression rules can be defined such that the traffic for specific applications can bypass compression (if the application itself already compresses the data, for example).

Management of the appliances is via a browser-based (IE5.5/6) GUI, a CLI, or the vendor's separately offered Converged Policy Manager appliance, which can manage multiple CTMs from a central location. SNMP v1 and v2c is also supported, and listed, compatible 3rd party management platforms include HP OpenView and Concord eHealth.

Individual appliances currently available in the CTM range from the 6110, with dual 10/100 ports and support for up to 2,500 sessions and a total throughput of 512 Kb/sec; to the 12250 with dual 10/100/1000 ports and support for up to 500,000 sessions and a total throughput of up to 250 Mb/sec. The 12xxx series of appliances additionally offers a hot standby redundant power supply.

New to the latest release of the CTM appliances is the inclusion of 3 predefined policy templates--including a voice template--and support for offline editing of policies.

The CTM appliances are available now, with base pricing starting at $2,500. Contact Converged Access for further information.

product submission by DPW Staff

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