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Breaking News - Networking:

RouteScience Software Ensures Quality Over Hybrid Networks

RouteScience Technologies, a leading provider of adaptive networking software (ANS), announced RouteScience ANS version 5 (ANS5), the latest edition of its flagship software product that maximizes distributed application availability over any combination of private or public network fabric. ANS5 breaks new ground in adaptive wide area network (WAN) management, adding greater depth and sophistication to its already detailed understanding of applications' network service needs, as well as significantly enhancing user visibility into how WAN anomalies affect business-critical applications. Guided by business policy descriptions, the software treats all of the various WAN connections as an aggregate virtual application delivery system, and optimizes the user experience in real time, thereby dramatically reducing calls to the help desk.

RouteScience ANS5's application-focused WAN management capabilities go beyond simply monitoring and reporting on the degree of network latency, loss and jitter that cause brownouts and other network problems. ANS5 applies its knowledge of the specific network service needs of Web, enterprise, voice-over-IP (VoIP), and multimedia applications to assess all available paths through the WAN, determine the best path based on specific application needs and current network conditions, and adjust the path through the network automatically in real time to assure the appropriate levels of service at the lowest cost for each type of application. ANS5 documents the assessment and decision-making processes extensively in a variety of traffic and application-based reports, as well as a live troubleshooting report for those rare occasions when it cannot automatically bypass an outage in the corporate WAN and an operator must be alerted to take action.


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"Businesses increasingly depend on IT to make them more competitive, but a poorly functioning application delivery infrastructure not only incurs higher costs and delivers lower performance, the reduced application availability also lowers productivity and impacts revenue," said Mark Lazar, CEO of RouteScience. "ANS5 makes enterprise applications work better by significantly eliminating or reducing the impact of problems in the application delivery infrastructure, assuring the highest availability while optimizing cost and performance."

Adapts To Service Demands Of Enterprise Applications

Similar in concept to the way power and telephone companies manage their networks, RouteScience ANS5 makes the wide area network adapt to the service demands of enterprise applications based on business policies, as well as on what the software learns dynamically as it monitors and assesses application quality. Its business-level view of network operations focuses on how applications -- rather than networks -- are performing, ensuring continuous availability of business-critical applications. This translates directly to both top-line revenue and bottom-line dollar impact through greater productivity and lower costs. Further, because ANS5 instantaneously shifts traffic to the lowest cost path, businesses are better able to negotiate more favorable rates from their service providers. ANS5's ability to quantify upstream service level achievement helps businesses ensure suppliers are meeting their SLAs.

"ANS5 makes possible the kind of highly available, highly reliable, adaptive wide area network we need to support our operations," said Michael Smith, CTO at Forbes.com. "The growing use of complex, distributed applications for everything from wireless mobile sales forces to offshore outsourced call centers requires a highly available and reliable application delivery infrastructure, and RouteScience is the only company today providing this capability."

ANS5's sophisticated application models allow the software to assess application quality with the knowledge of the network services needs of Web, enterprise, voice-over-IP and multimedia applications. The models take into consideration the relative impact of different types of network impairment (latency, loss, and jitter), which are evaluated in a manner consistent with each specific type of application. Each of ANS5's application models can be fine-tuned to correspond to a specific customer's application environment.

RouteScience ANS5 offers a wide variety of application-oriented reports, and the main dashboard provides a summary view of key operational aspects of ANS5. The software also offers a report-only mode that recommends best path updates and calculates the potential for increased availability, improved performance or reduced cost but does not communicate them to the network infrastructure. This allows the IT staff to review the improvement RouteScience ANS5 could make before actually allowing the automatic adjustments to occur.

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