iShaper Overview

iShaper is a Unified Branch Office Appliance, specifically designed for branch office deployment. It unifies the following technologies, in a single box:

• Deep Visibility — iShaper discovers exactly what applications are running on your network. Using its unique Layer-7 Plus classification, the appliance is able to identify over 600 applications.
• Intelligent Acceleration — iShaper uses the type of acceleration appropriate for each application: protocol (CIFS, TCP, HTTP) acceleration, data compression, and/or caching.
• Application QoS — iShaper’s bundle of Quality of Service (QoS) features improves the performance and ensures the availability of all key applications.
• Branch Services — Shaper offers two editions, Workgroup and Branch Office, with each edition offering a different set of services. In the Workgroup Edition, iShaper delivers Microsoft Print, DNS, and DHCP. The Branch Office Edition includes these services in addition to ISA web caching services and Domain Controller.

Because of the multiple technologies integrated into the product, the appliance is able to deliver high performance for every type of application — voice, video, and data.

Dual-Plane Architecture

iShaper is based on an innovative dual-plane architecture. The Inline Plane is inline, and thus offers high-speed, near-zero latency flow processing for visibility, application QoS, RAM-based compression, and protocol acceleration. The Advanced Services Plane is responsible for optimizations, such as file caching and wide dictionary compression (WDC). Because these optimizations involve disk I/O, they are best suited for out-of-band application. Microsoft-compliant branch services also take place on the Advanced Services Plane.

The dual-plane architecture provides visibility, application QoS, WAN optimization, Windows branch services, and Wide Area File Services (WAFS) that work in concert at the branch office, in a single appliance. This system streamlines the branch office infrastructure, centralizes storage, and reduces costs for branch office operations — without forcing a performance penalty on branch office workers.

iShaper Inline Plane

To optimize network traffic so that it matches the business requirements of branch office users, the iShaper Inline Plane leverage Packeteer Layer 7 Plus visibility to let you discover and monitor traffic at the application level, diagnose problems, and apply application-specific technologies to solve them. Specifically, you can apply shaping techniques to protect important applications’ response times at the expense of non-business or non-time-critical traffic. You can selectively apply acceleration where it makes sense — for example to speed customer-critical applications — without accelerating recreational traffic.

In summary, the iShaper Inline Plane:

• Discovers and allows you to monitor application traffic and performance
• Ensures key applications are always available with application QOS
• Increases bandwidth capacity and reduces WAN costs by controlling and compressing WAN traffic
• Accelerates key applications

iShaper Advanced Services Plane

The iShaper Advanced Services Plane allow organizations to consolidate their data files on servers at the data center and allows branch office users fast access to the centralized data. iShaper WAFS fully synchronizes files between sites and minimizes WAN bandwidth and costs while providing fast file access and application acceleration. Because it incorporates genuine Microsoft Windows Server technologies, iShaper is fully integrated with your Microsoft networking, sharing, management, and security methods.

In summary, the iShaper Advanced Services Plane:

• Eliminates the need for storage and servers at branch offic locations
• Provides fast access to central file storage, even during WAN outages
• Accelerates other key applications such as SharePoint, FTP, and email
• Delivers integrated Microsoft print, SMS, DNS/DHCP and Domain Controller services locally

Tunnels

On the Inline Plane, iShaper automatically identifies other iShaper and PacketShaper units on the network, dynamically sets up a communication link (a tunnel) between the units, and sends compressed or accelerated data through the tunnel. For example, if compression is enabled, the data in the encapsulated link is compressed between the iShaper at the edge and the PacketShaper in the core. These Inline Plane tunnels are called Xpress tunnels.

Likewise, iShaper at the edge sets up tunnels with iShared or iShaper appliances at the core in order to transport data on the Advanced Services Plane. There are two types of tunnels:

• WAFS tunnels accelerate CIFS (Common Internet File System) traffic by caching data at the edge, providing optimized file access for users at the branch office. Eliminating the need to wait for acknowledgements for each 4KB block of data, iShaper opens the file, compresses it, and then streams the entire file across the WAN in a WAFS tunnel. The iShaper also uses differencing technology to transmit only differences between versions at the branch office and data center, minimizing the use of WAN bandwidth.
  
  
• WDC tunnels accelerate all other types of TCP traffic by compressing data streams with wide dictionary compression (WDC). With this technology, new data streams are catalogued and assigned a tag on both appliances at either end of a connection. When the sender attempts to transfer the same data stream again, the much smaller tag is transferred on the WAN instead of the actual data stream.

WAFS and WDC tunnels are configured on each iShaper Edge appliance by specifying the IP address of the iShared/iShaper Core appliance.

Requirements

The iShaper requires the following software versions:

• Advanced Services Plane: iShaper 3.6.0 or higher
• Inline Plane: iShaper 8.2.1 or higher

Warning: Do not load previous versions of iShared software on the Advanced Services Plane or earlier versions of PacketShaper software on the Inline Plane. Doing so will cause boot and/or performance issues.

The iShaper in the branch office requires the following equipment at the data center:

• A PacketShaper running PacketWise 8.2.1 or higher, and an iShared appliance running v3.6 or higher
  
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• An iShaper appliance

Central Management Requirements

The iShaper appliance can be managed from:

• iMS 3.6.0 or higher
• PolicyCenter 8.2.1 or higher
• ReportCenter 3.1. You will need the latest ReportCenter patch (3.1.1.6) in order to have ReportCenter recognize the iShaper and include its data in reports. To download the patch, go to: http://www.packeteer.com/support/down_main.cfm and enter your ReportCenter serial number.

Unsupported Features

The following features are not supported on the iShaper:

• Direct standby and access-link monitoring on the Inline Plane
• Failover on the Advanced Services Plane