DPI Announcements - Blue Coat Introduces Carrier Caching Appliance

 

Bluecoat announced today the Blue Coat® CacheFlow™ Appliance 5000 Series solution, which "Using advanced caching technology, this new appliance helps scale service delivery to meet the burgeoning subscriber demand for online video, large file downloads and other Web 2.0 rich media content while improving subscriber experience".

See full release here.

Bluecoat has a long history of providing caching products to enterprises and service providers (the current product line name, Cacheflow, used to be the company's name 8 years ago), usually supporting caching of web pages content. The new appliance targets the high-volume traffic of video and similar traffic, with carrier class capacity (having 1 and 10GE interfaces).

While caching may improve subscriber experience, it has to be deployed with a DPI/bandwidth management device in order to realize bandwidth savings - otherwise it will just allow subscribers to download more content. For this reason we see a number of partnerships between other caching companies and DPI companies. Some examples come from the two leaders in caching - PeerApp and Oversi.

• PeerApp Announces UltraBand Certified Partner Program (here) - "PeerApp’s first certified partner Allot Communications Ltd. is a leader in IP service optimization and revenue-generating solutions based on deep packet inspection (DPI) technology"
   
• Sandvine And PeerApp Deploy In Five Networks (here) - "The Sandvine-PeerApp integrated content caching solution leverages Sandvine’s Policy Traffic Switch (PTS) hardware, detailed protocol identification capabilities and PeerApp’s expertise in multi-service, multi-protocol caching solution for video and download services.".
  
  Sandvine also lists Oversi as an ecosystem solution partner (here) 

Bluecoat has in-house DPI/QoS products - the result of acquiring Packeteer (the Packetshaper line -here) two years ago. However, this line adresses the enterprise market, due to limited capacity.

The release does not say if P2P file sharing is supported, which is the prime application supported by Oversi an PeerApp. So, either Bluecoat is trying to avoid the legal issues associated with caching copyright protected video and music or they do not support it. Nevertheless, itis still (with YouTube traffic) the main load on ISPs networks and peering links.

So how is Bluecoat going to present a full solution to the market?