Packeteer Delivers BOB for Paragon

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Packeteer (NASDAQ: PKTR), the global leader in WAN Application Delivery, today announced that Paragon Engineering Services, an award-winning engineering firm headquartered in York, Penn., is deploying Packeteer’s iShaper™ solution to monitor and shape network traffic, and improve performance for its centralized AutoCAD, Microsoft Office and voice over IP (VoIP) applications. The iShaper solution leverages Packeteer’s Intelligent Service Assurance strategy to ensure that Paragon’s critical business applications are delivered with optimal performance to any user anywhere in the organization, with complete data integrity for the company’s multi-office project collaboration needs.

Paragon Engineering first began experiencing problems after the company opened a new office in Allentown, Penn. When engineers attempted to collaborate on a project with the staff at York, where the company’s data center is located, productivity suffered due to the file sharing of large AutoCAD files. On the recommendation of a consultant who was hired to troubleshoot and address these issues, Paragon’s president, Vaughn Silar, decided to implement the Distributed File System (DFS) feature in Windows Server 2003, deploying identical servers in each office to avoid problems. “The consultant struggled for months to get it to work,” Silar said. “They changed the configuration and tried different ways of replicating files. We looked at Sharepoint. We even upgraded from DSL to T1 lines to eliminate the WAN as a source of any problems. Nothing seemed to work as it was supposed to, and no one seemed to know how to fix it.”

The defining moment came when file corruption caused an entire day’s work to be lost. In response, Silar investigated WAN optimization solutions, including acceleration-only products, and ultimately selected Packeteer’s iShaper system. “iShaper has everything we need—the wide area file system, the intelligent traffic shaping, the management visibility and more—all in a single appliance. And with the history of problems we had encountered, iShaper’s support for the native Microsoft file system gave us increased confidence that it would work as advertised, ” Silar added.

Within a day of deploying the Packeteer solution at each office, Paragon’s engineers were collaborating successfully over the WAN. The staff in Allentown is now able to work on all AutoCAD and Microsoft Office files, which are cached from the server in York to deliver LAN-like performance. VoIP traffic on the company’s IP PBX, which was installed to eliminate multiple voice lines at each office, is now being shaped to yield significantly better quality of service. These two improvements were as expected, but the implementation also revealed there was a surprising amount of internet traffic traversing Paragon’s WAN. With the iShapers, the system now allows internet use in a way that does not interfere with the speed required for other business critical functions. “I continue to be amazed with just how powerful the iShaper is at understanding, controlling, and directing network usage,” Silar said.

Paragon’s iShaper deployment was facilitated by Packeteer’s partner CommSolutions (www.commsolutions.com), which immediately understood Paragon’s need to ensure that various types of application traffic would work in concert across Paragon’s network. “We knew that Paragon needed more than just an acceleration solution that would optimize only a narrow set of applications,” said Rich Geisel of CommSolutions. They needed a solution that would ensure the performance of any number of applications, starting with AutoCad and VoIP. Packeteer is the only solutions provider we have found that can totally address a company’s network traffic needs so that critical applications work together as a high performance service that boosts user productivity and company success. Packeteer makes it easy for us as an integrator to address our client needs with WAN Optimization technology that can really do it all.”Packeteer’s solution combines Deep Layer 7 Plus visibility, Intelligent Application Acceleration, compression and traffic shaping with Wide Area File Services (WAFS) to create a complete branch office-in-a-box for centralizing IT resources. Packeteer’s WAFS is a true distributed file system that combines file integrity features, such as read-ahead and file differencing, with WAN bandwidth optimization features, including application-intelligent caching, TCP acceleration and data reduction through wide-dictionary compression. Packeteer’s WAFS technology provides real-time, read/write access in native mode for Microsoft’s Common Internet File System (CIFS), enabling seamless operation with Paragon’s Microsoft Office and AutoCAD applications on the Windows Server 2003 platform.

The Windows Server that had been deployed in Allentown will now function as a back-up server in York. “We’re now fully centralized yet able to collaborate as if all our engineers were located in a single facility, and we no longer have any version control or file integrity problems,” Silar noted. Paragon may also employ Packeteer’s solution in an upcoming move to larger facilities in York. Silar believes the expenditure to buy or rent another system will be justifiable based on the ability to relocate people and infrastructure gradually without disruption. “With Packeteer, I get a complete and dependable branch office-in-a-box solution that I can install in less than a day, making it really easy to plan, budget and execute a move or open a new office. Given the business benefits of project collaboration and the advantages of deep visibility into network traffic, any engineering firm with more than one office that doesn’t have iShapers is missing a huge opportunity,” Silar said.

Packeteer Inc.