Packet Island Intros CloudCare

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Packet Island today announced the availability of CloudCare, a new hosted service that enables SMB and enterprise branch offices to monitor their WAN Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and pinpoint LAN congestion issues impacting their cloud-based services.

In today's world where more and more enterprises are moving to a cloud-based IT model, with voice, video, and data services delivered to various employee locations over the WAN, the Quality of Experience (QoE) provided by the WAN link and the enterprise's LAN become very important. Although there are a variety of high bandwidth broadband access technologies including DSL, cable, WiMax, traditional T1, etc., not all broadband technologies offer the same QoE when transporting real-time services like VoIP and Video. Furthermore, when services are delivered over the public Internet, QoE becomes even more vulnerable to degradation. As a result, the traditional means of monitoring WAN SLAs by performing response-time analysis of the route path is not sufficient anymore. For enterprises using SIP trunking, video, and other real-time services, it is imperative to continuously monitor the real-time quality of their WAN links by using real-time metrics such as jitter, packet loss, and!

delay. Also, given that many of today's network congestion problems are due to the use of bandwidth intensive personal entertainment and P2P applications, it is essential to have visibility into the LAN to understand who/what may be causing the congestion. Without such monitoring, enterprises and service providers end up in an expensive finger-pointing game when it comes to troubleshooting quality degradation with their cloud-based services.

Packet Island's CloudCare hosted service enables enterprises and managed service providers to go beyond simple response time monitoring to monitoring the real-time quality of their WAN or inter-site links. CloudCare also provides detailed Network Behavior and Top-N-Flow Analysis of the customer's LAN, enabling them to locate the LAN sources that cause WAN congestion. CloudCare is implemented using an inexpensive 4" x 5" micro-appliance that is permanently deployed at the customer site, in an in-line or mirrored-port configuration.

"Without CloudCare we would have no way to gain visibility into the quality of our customer's wireless broadband link and the source of issues impacting the hosted VoIP services we deliver. With CloudCare, our customers realize significant savings by allowing us to quickly prove to their ISP that they are not meeting their SLA. The product enables us to offer a superior level of service to our customers at a great price." said Sarah Simmons, CEO of Protocall Communications.

Packet Island Inc.