The new version 2.3 of PRX Traffic Manager was announced recently by ipoque (www.ipoque.com), provider of professional solutions for Internet traffic management and analysis. The PRX product line offers a utility for the effective control of applications such as P2P file sharing, Instant Messaging (IM) and VoIP, including Skype, for enterprises, ISPs, universities etc. The latest version of the PRX Traffic Manager with its extended functionality meets the requirements of large network operators and offers a maximum flexibility. The PRX product line for Internet traffic management and analysis comprises hardware traffic managers for Gigabit and Fast Ethernet. The ipoque filter technology functions in two principle ways.

    In the first way it offers the opportunity of entirely blocking programs such as P2P file sharing, IM, VoIP or Skype, which can to bypass legacy firewalls. On the other way, ipoque Traffic Managers offers an intelligent user-based bandwidth control as well as better way to utilize the backbone networks by throttling P2P traffic automatically in situations of high network load.

    Besides the improved identification of encrypted P2P protocols, a significant innovation is the whitelisting feature for BitTorrent. The PRX Traffic Manager 2.3 was extended with some leading-edge functionalities. The program allows the differentiated treatment of BitTorrent trackers. Choosen legal trackers such as tracker.opensuse.org can be registered in a whitelist so that their BitTorrent traffic is accepted. All other BitTorrent traffic can be blocked. In addition, the new version of the PRX Traffic Manager offers the identification of Internet traffic caused by filehosters. Filehosters such as Rapidshare, Uploading.com or Megaupload.com are being used ever more frequently to distribute copyrighted data files on the Internet. Due to measurements conducted by ipoque, an estimated share of over 5% of Germany´s overall Internet traffic is actually produced by such filehosters. This share will very likely grow considerably during the next months.

    Private users upload the data files on a filehoster´s server. A link to these files is then shared by other means, most commonly through blogs and web pages. Clicking on such a link will download the file directly from the filehoster's server. In most cases, a password provided on the web page containing the link is required to decrypt the actual data files. A limited download of data files is always possible and free of charge. For a fee, data files can be downloaded at full DSL speed. Some of the major filehosting operators run large data centers. Rapidshare for example provides its users a storage capacity of over 1,500 terabytes with a total bandwidth of 90 gigabits/s.

For more information visit www.ipoque.com.