Universities Deploy Procera Hardware to Prioritize Network Traffic

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/25/08

Korea University in Seoul and Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia are both using Procera's PacketLogic PL10000 hardware to gain visibility into network application traffic and control over non-academic use of network bandwidth.

Korea U is one of the first to deploy the new application and network management hardware. The school was grappling with how to balance academic and recreational Internet usage for a growing number of students and myriad applications.

"The amount of bandwidth and sophistication of these applications continues to increase exponentially," said Deok Il Kang, a staff member of the IT System Management department at the university, which is within the Office of Information & Computing. "As a result, Procera's ability to give us deep, real-time insight into our network traffic, as well as the ability to shape that traffic, is an invaluable tool. With PacketLogic PL10000, we now have the capacity needed to handle the increasing traffic load."

Korea U has 30,000 students located in its two campuses, the main one in central Seoul and a secondary campus in Jochiwon.

Swinburne, with 40,000 users spread across multiple campuses, was seeking a way to optimize use of bandwidth to extend the life of its investments in infrastructure.

"The volume-based shaping has given us greater flexibility when applying rules to specific groups of users," said Paul Dealy, a member of Swinburne's IT Services. "PacketLogic is more well-suited to meet a university's set of requirements than the other products we trialed, and the response from Procera's support group was really encouraging. Our ROI has been incredible since our deployment; we've cut our peak bandwidth consumption by 30 percent."

Swinburne uses PacketLogic's border gateway protocol (BGP) functionality, which allows for the establishment of rules based on the destination network, and the drilldown features, to see details--such as URL--when investigating the behavior of a host.