Video Tools to Enforce Rules and Manage Bandwidth

If the heavy use of streaming video, Web apps, or large documents are clogging your WAN pipe and degrading application performance, network appliances can help you manage the situation. Traditional bandwidth allocation appliances help ensure that critical applications get bandwidth priority. Newer appliances offer rules you can set for video.

Juniper WXC 500 and 250: These bandwidth allocation devices can help an enterprise deal with video and applications that are taxing WAN bandwidth. With 40GB to 3-terabyte hard drives, they also store pieces of frequently revised large files so that only the changes travel over the WAN.

Cisco WAE appliances: These WAE modules and appliances are part of Cisco’s WAN optimization solution that monitors and manages how bandwidth is used by different applications and video. Cisco Application and Content Networking System software for these appliances and add-on modules for Cisco Integrated Services Routers will add functionality specifically for video, including compression, caching and other tricks to reduce the flow of video-related data over the WAN.

Blue Coat SG appliances: Can make video rules easy to apply, based on your preferences. For example, you may want to block specific sites or parts of sites, at specific times, or simply slow down streaming video when the WAN pipe becomes clogged. Uses caching, compression and intelligent handling of the video stream to reduce the amount of video-related traffic on the WAN.