WAN optimization as a technology and a market is still heating up. And with today's distributed networks and WANs that span the globe, kicking applications and WAN traffic into high gear is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity.

WAN optimization/acceleration allows network pros to speed performance across the WAN with compression, caching, protocol shaping, and other techniques. It also lets network managers allot dedicated amounts of bandwidth to certain types of traffic to ensure that they are not competing with other traffic for space in the pipe.

According to the results of our Product Leadership survey, readers gave the illustrious gold award in WAN optimization/acceleration to PacketShaper from Packeteer. PacketShaper fires applications through the WAN and can monitor more than 500 applications with Layer 7 visibility. The box also offers network and application monitoring and analysis, traffic shaping and quality of service, application acceleration, centralized monitoring and reporting, traffic marking, and symmetric compression.

More than 80% of PacketShaper users surveyed said they saw good or excellent net WAN throughput improvement with PacketShaper. Just under 85% also rated their transfer time improvement as good or excellent, and more than 80% praised the product's network integration and interoperability.

Our readers also praised PacketShaper's monitoring tools, its application-specific support, and its ease of deployment and maintenance, giving it top ratings in each of those three criteria. Packeteer also received high marks, 73%, for vendor service and support; more than 75% of respondents said they are getting their money's worth.

One user noted that deploying PacketShaper is "cheaper than a WAN upgrade."

Another user, whose WAN was being bogged down by unnecessary network traffic, praised PacketShaper's ability to limit unwanted traffic while speeding up the WAN for other necessary day-to-day tasks. That user wrote that PacketShaper is an "excellent product that helped us squeeze down specific hogs such as YouTube and Google videos without having to lock down individual URLs or protocols."

Andrew R. Hickey, Senior News Writer