We were using an old Packeteer PacketShaper way back in the day. Exinda approached optimization a bit differently. We were able to prioritize the stuff that we needed on campus. I can remember back when downloads were pretty heavy. This was before streaming really took off. People were downloading and torrenting movies. So, we used it to squash all that to optimize and prioritize our traffic for classroom use. On a college campus, you're pretty much an ISP because you have residents that live there.

There is a fine balance between things that people need and things that they want. Obviously, if we let them, students would be on Xbox all day long and that would take over the network. Then, at night, once classes are over, we use some time-based rules. However, we do keep some rules up there above everything, like our classroom podiums, which we know need to be optimized pretty much around the clock.

When we had PacketShaper, we had a couple of T1 lines at the time. It did some pretty cool things. Our network admin was able to shape the traffic for certain times of the day by cutting out a lot of the downloads. At a certain times, the traffic would just open up. Then, at the end of the day, it was like, "Wow, everybody is just taking over the network after hours." Nowadays, you can't even do that. 

Where we used to have just the standard daytime workload of classes, we have now a Fall semester, a Winter term, a Spring semester, a May term, a June term, and experiential term with classes that go all day long and running around the clock. Since COVID-19 hit, you have traffic coming over from the dorms, which now includes some classroom/classwork activity, where most of it was traditionally just entertainment. Now all of a sudden, since classrooms are just kind of all over the place, you have some classes that are online only and some that are in person with some of them being a hybrid of the two. With students taking classes from their dorm room, there has been an emphasis from our administration on making sure that students are able to get to what they need.

It used to be that if a switch or something failed over in a dorm, if we could get to it and have it up within the day, then we were good. Now, it's like a catastrophe because it's just like a class being down. If we have someone over in a dorm who is unable to stream their class over Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc., then that is seen as major and important. Looking at the application performance as a whole across campus, it's like the classroom could technically be anywhere now. You have to make sure that those applications are going to work regardless of where they're coming from.

Compared to some of the stuff that I've used a decade ago, the Exinda solution is night and day. It gives you more from a cost perspective. I've priced out some other solutions, and Exinda was a bit more reasonable priced than a lot of the competition in my opinion.

I have used and supported Blue Coat Packetshaper and also currently support Procera Networks bandwidth management solution. As a VAR I support a number of solutions. Exinda is effective and relatively intuitive & easy to use.

We had Riverbed, XipLink, and UniGateway. Before Exinda, we were playing with all of them at the same time. We still use a little bit of XipLink.

We decided to switch because we did a comparison. We ran six solutions side-by-side and we tested them based on speed of installation, reporting, acceleration, shaping, ease of use, and cost. We used an Excel spreadsheet and we got a whole bunch of test sites and we evaluated every single product that we could find.

It came down to three products: Riverbed and XipLink in addition to Exinda. Then the purchasing people went off and had a chat. They were able to bargain things down a little bit on price, so we picked Exinda. The cost drops a little bit when you buy a bigger domain license.

The con with Riverbed is that it was expensive. It has a lot of third-party add-on features that are, to be honest with you, a little bit better than Exinda on the add-on features, especially with things like Citrix.

Ziplink has a different format. It uses tunnels, which can be very good at times. You can use a tunnel to push traffic in a specific direction.

Exinda does not do the tunnels, but it is almost as good as Riverbed, although without the additional features. But then, the cost is much less, so you get better value for your money.

We did not have a previous solution. We went with Exinda because it works. It did what we wanted it to do, in terms of optimizing WAN traffic and our business saw a benefit as a result.

We used to use traditional packet shapers, and when we decided to replace that approach, we went with this solution which, rather than packet shaping, does more application shaping.

No other solution, just used Cisco QoS for our WAN.