Avoids WAN Bandwidth Upgrades After Deploying PacketShapers
Throughout Entire North American Facilities
Cupertino, Calif. – January 23, 2007 – PacketeerÒ (NASDAQ: PKTR), the global leader in WAN Application Optimization, today announced that Columbia Forest Products, North America’s largest manufacturer of hardwood plywood and veneer, has deployed PacketShaper™ appliances at each of its 22 production facilities and sales offices to optimize the performance of its enterprise-wide network. By leveraging Packeteer’s highly granular visibility tools to classify all applications running across its WAN, Columbia is now able to satisfy stringent response-time performance for its business-critical applications. With Packeteer’s intelligent application delivery approach, which first assesses application traffic to determine the correct WAN optimization and acceleration technology, Columbia avoided a costly WAN bandwidth upgrade to its existing network infrastructure.
“The nature of our business requires locating production facilities in remote and rural areas where the cost of WAN bandwidth is extraordinarily high,” commented Cliff Cayer, director, network operations at Columbia. “As we added new business-critical applications and new sites to our network, the existing fractional T1 links became congested. User response times were degraded significantly. The problem was particularly challenging because we maintain a fully centralized IT architecture with all our applications housed in the Portland, Oregon, the data center at our coporate headquarters.”
To assist with the design and implementation of Packeteer’s Packetshaper appliances, Columbia Forest Products selected Structured Communication Systems. “Structured deployed and implemented a state of the art, reliable application that boosted Columbia Forest Products network performance," said Jerry Bassett, vice- president of the Voice and Mobility practice at Structured. "We were proud to be able to provide our expertise in IT solutions as well as the high quality and skilled engineering services that yielded bottom-line results for Columbia Forest Products.”
In 2000, Columbia investigated available alternatives to increasing WAN bandwidth. At the time, Cayer determined that only Packeteer offered a viable solution. The company initially deployed PacketShaper 1500s, which solved the traffic congestion problems and averted the need to renegotiate a favorable telecommunications contract for more than four years.
As traffic continued to increase, Columbia upgraded all 20 production facilities and both sales offices with PacketShaper 2500s, and installed two model 9500s in a redundant, load-sharing configuration at the headquarters datacenter. Today the network supports over 1100 users and several additional applications, yet still continues to utilize the same low-cost Fractional T1 links with no degradation in performance.
Cayer explained the rationale behind the decision to adopt Packeteer over alternative solutions: “Routers are not the right device for traffic management because they are able to queue traffic based only on packet prioritization schemes. These are difficult to align with the traffic specific to individual applications. In fact, there is simply no way to do what we do with PacketShapers using routers because you can’t manage something the routers cannot measure.”
With full visibility into all traffic flows through Layer 7, Columbia is able to shape bandwidth dynamically in a hierarchical manner for every application running on its network. The critical applications, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, sales and reporting, printing, and email, perform within Columbia's stringent response times requirements 99 percent of the time. The system is also configured to prohibit and slow some traffic, such as streaming video and low priority applications. Other traffic, some of it suspected as intentional attempts to slow network bandwidth, is banned.
During periods when bandwidth is available, users are permitted to surf the Web, download software updates and perform other less critical tasks. “Our user community understands the need to manage network bandwidth,” commented Robert Buckmaster, Columbia’s lead engineer on the project. “They appreciate the enhanced performance and productivity they get in their daily routine, and respect the fact we need to throttle back or block Web surfing and other ‘leisurely pursuits’ during peak traffic periods. In effect, if it’s not on the ‘allow’ list, we want to restrict that traffic when the network is busy with more important tasks.”
Packeteer’s intelligent monitoring and shaping tools are able to track end-to-end network performance, as well as peak and average utilization by application and user, both historically and in real-time. With immediate access to meaningful data on all network traffic, Columbia’s IT staff spends less time troubleshooting WAN performance problems, and more time focusing on strategic IT initiatives.
“It seems fitting that a company capable of getting the most from every tree by cutting veneer to within a fraction of an inch is able to run a billion-dollar business on fractional T1 lines,” Cayer said. “We really push the PacketShapers to their limit. The advanced levels of visibility and granularity for assessing netowrk traffic give us total control over bandwidth utilization. Predictable and consistent throughput performance delivered by the PacketShapers is instrumental in meeting our demanding business objectives.”
About Columbia Forest Products
Founded in 1957, Columbia Forest Products (www.columbiaforestproducts.com) is North America’s largest manufacturer of hardwood plywood and hardwood veneer. The company also markets and produces engineered and solid wood flooring products. Columbia’s decorative interior veneers and panels are used in high-end cabinetry, fine furniture, architectural millwork and commercial fixtures. Employee-owned and based in Portland, Oregon, Columbia employs more than 3,500 and operates facilities in locations throughout the United States, Canada and Malaysia.
About Structured Communication Systems, Inc.
Structured Communication Systems, Inc. is the Northwest's largest local provider of Secure Technology Infrastructure Solutions. We are the leading provider in the areas of Secure InfraStructure, Voice and Mobility, and Storage and Systems. We enable our clients to increase profits, improve competitive advantage, and create new business opportunities. Structured provides expert professional services, and people-oriented customer service that exceed our customer expectations. Structured’s Corporate Headquarters: 4382 SE International Way, Suite C, Portland, OR, 97222. Structured offers professional IT solutions throughout our expanding territory and currently has local offices in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Idaho. More information on Structured can be found at www.structured.com or by calling toll free 1-800-881-0962.
About Packeteer
Packeteer, Inc. (NASDAQ: PKTR) is the global market leader in high-performance, intelligent WAN Application Delivery. With over 55,000 systems deployed at more than 7,000 customers worldwide, Packeteer solutions increase WAN capacity and accelerate and ensure predictable network application performance for all users anywhere in the distributed enterprise. By automatically classifying over 600 applications and protocols and utilizing the most comprehensive network monitoring, QoS, WAFS and acceleration technologies, Packeteer solutions improve business operational efficiency and provide customers with a rapid return on investment. For more information, contact Packeteer at +1 408-873-4400 or visit the company’s web site at http://www.packeteer.com.
Safe Harbor Clause – The statements contained in this press release that are not purely historical are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, including statements regarding Packeteer's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, express or implied statements regarding future revenues, revenue growth and profitability, spending levels by existing and prospective customers, the markets for our products, new product development, liquidity and macro economic conditions. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based upon information available to Packeteer as of the date hereof. Packeteer assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Actual results may differ materially due to a number of factors including the perceived need for our products, our ability to convince potential customers of our value proposition, the costs of competitive solutions, continued capital spending by prospective customers and macro economic conditions. These and other risks relating to Packeteer's business are set forth in Packeteer's Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 16, 2006, and Packeteer's Form 10-Qs and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Packeteer, PacketShaper, PacketShaper Express are trademarks or registered trademarks of Packeteer, Inc. All other products and services are the trademarks of their respective owners.