Commercial Bandwidth Management Products

Commercial bandwidth management solutions are available from various vendors including Packeteer, Checkpoint, Merilus, and Emerging Technologies. Commercial vendors have features unique to their particular products and one may work best for your situation.

Currently, Packeteer holds the largest market share. Packeteer provides an intuitive graphical user interface, user support, and hardware to run their software. However, Packeteer also has the most expensive of the various commercial solutions on the market.

Packeteer competes with products from Checkpoint, which produces Floodgate. Floodgate is designed to operate with Checkpoint's FW-1 firewall software, to provide a fully functional firewall and bandwidth-management solution. The Checkpoint solution requires the FW-1 firewall, as well as Solaris, Linux, or Microsoft Windows NT. Floodgate-1 is the best solution if your network is already running the FW-1 firewall or the VPN-1 from Checkpoint.

Other Packeteer competitors include solutions from Merilus and Emerging Technologies. The Merilus solution is part of their Gateway Guardian Enterprise Edition and runs on a dedicated box. Gateway Guardian Enterprise Edition is a powerful bandwidth management system for the enterprise.