Ukiah Hits the Road for Directory-Enabled Traffic Control - Ukiah Software's NetRoad TrafficWare - Software Review - Evaluation

As applications and their users begin to place intense demands on network bandwidth, squeezing every last drop of performance from your existing network infrastructure without breaking the bank becomes a high priority. Ukiah Software Inc. (Campbell, Calif.) merges into the network traffic control fast lane with NetRoad TrafficWare, a solution that offers bandwidth managers with a twist: directory services integration.

According to Gordon Smith, Ukiah vice president of marketing, a major performance bottleneck occurs when users combine private LANs or enterprise networks, which are usually pretty fast, with the much slower Internet. "If you can't increase the throughput, you have to manage the bandwidth you can get most effectively, which is our approach," says Smith.

NetRoad TrafficWare is a software-based bandwidth management solution that enables administrators to control network services on the basis of priorities, user-definable bandwidth levels and rules for admitting network sessions. TrafficWare prioritizes various network traffic using a variety of variables, including source and destination, network application, time of day and URLs. The end result is that important network traffic gets where it needs to go more quickly than less important traffic.

There are numerous network bandwidth management solutions currently on the market, but the problem with existing solutions is that they are based on proprietary hardware and software, claims Ukiah. For example, Packeteer Inc. (Campbell, Calif.) offers a bandwidth management solution called PacketShaper that consists of a hardware device that sits behind WAN devices, while the current version of Flood-Gate-1 from CheckPoint Software Technologies Ltd. (Redwood City, Calif.) runs on Sun Solaris and requires a Windows 95 or Windows NT management GUI. In contrast, Ukiah's TrafficWare is currently the only management software solution that is based on Windows NT and does not require proprietary hardware, according to the company.

Add integration with directory services into the mix, and TrafficWare begins to differentiate itself from the pack. Because TrafficWare is LDAP-compliant, administrators can use existing network management infrastructures to set network policies; previously defined Novell Directory Services or Netscape Directory Server users and groups, for example, can serve as the basis for bandwidth traffic policies. With LDAP support, TrafficWare can integrate future directory services, such as Microsoft's Active Directory.

Bandwidth management packages that do not exploit directory services in this way typically require their own management infrastructure and database that must be administered regularly, making complicated networks all the more labor-intensive and complex. Administrators need to start from scratch, building a separate management system that incorporates network users and resources, so that bandwidth levels can be assigned.

"Network administrators need to have a single point of control and a single repository of information," says Ukiah's Smith, who notes that with LDAP integrated into TrafficWare, users can apply traffic policies to any users or groups that already exist in the network directory services. "You'd have to redefine all of your users and groups all over again and maintain two separate consoles if your management solution wasn't integrated into directory services," explains Smith.

Unique to TrafficWare is its ability to control IP traffic using a hybrid of both flow control and queuing technologies, which greatly expands the scope of controllable traffic types. "Some apps just cannot be managed through flow control -- multimedia, for example," points out Smith. "By blending both flow control and queuing, we provide the most flexibility and ability to manage the whole network traffic spectrum."

Sam Alunni, vice president of networking at analyst firm Sterling Research (Sterling, Mass.), feels that by integrating quality of service with directory services, Ukiah has differentiated its NetRoad TrafficWare from the rest of the competition. "[NetRoad TrafficWare's] integration with directory services gives Ukiah a leg up on the competition. Finally, we're at the point where the enterprise infrastructures are becoming so complex that directory services has found a role that is really on the verge of solving a need," says Alunni, who feels that Ukiah's solution will save administrators from numerous headaches. "The benefits of integrating with directory services are perfectly clear. Let's face it, if Microsoft had a directory service as robust as Novell's NDS, we'd all be using it," concludes Alunni.

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