Sometimes users can knowingly, or unknowingly, abuse a network by using a lot of bandwidth. With the proliferation of video on demand services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, some institutions are once again finding themselves battling bandwidth issues.
Until now, one needed an in-line device, such as a firewall, to throttle traffic by allocating certain bandwidth to certain flows or applications. Any in-line device also adds latency and reduces reliability, especially on high speed links. Wouldn’t it be nice to throttle specific traffic in a way that does not impact performance of the traffic you do care about? This has been an age-old conundrum for network engineers.
Well, continuing on our hot streak of innovations, MetaFlows recently developed (in collaboration with one of our university customers) an unprecedented technique to throttle traffic in passive mode! It works a bit like active response, where spoofed packets are injected into the traffic stream to shut down flows. In this case, we are not shutting down flows, we are forcing them to slow down.
The result is that you can identify any TCP flow using one or more of our 20,000 signatures (appID is coming very soon), and limit its bandwidth. This means you can have zero impact on performance and reliability of your production traffic while you can achieve very fine grain control of the traffic you do not care about!