There are quite a few “wow” features in this upcoming release. Here are some first impressions now that our early beta users have had a chance to kick the tires on a live 8.6 system…

1) Scalable Time and Date for reporting

Ever ask the question, “what was my bandwidth usage between 9:00pm and 12:00 pm last Thursday?” We now have the answer at your finger tips. Using the time and date range bar, located at the top of all our graphical reports, you can hone in on a particular time/date period – immediately rescaling the report as you move the bar. Our previous releases had fixed time periods of one day, one week, one month, etc. which was nice, but nowhere near as convenient. This was one of our most requested features.

2) Set your Priority to expire

Giving a user priority is akin to giving them permanent keys to the Fort Knox of Bandwidth. Perhaps you have a user that has a good reason for some extra bandwidth on Tuesday evening due to a business presentation; but come Wednesday you don’t wan’t their laptop with priority to accidentally go off in the middle day on a 50G backup with unlimited bandwidth, that might bring your network to a crawl. Never fear! Now, when assigning priority you can set an expiration date on your priority and avoid leaving that gate open.

3) Watch individual usage live on your screen

We have always had static reports on historical usage per IP, and now we have added a real time bar chart that updates once a second, so you can see in real time what a single IP is doing in terms of usage. I have used it while watching youtube and Netflix video, and was surprised to see how these application will consistently burst ahead to buffer up large chunks of bandwidth just by watching the usage bar jump up. I had suspected this behavior from Netflix, but it was nice to see it confirmed visually on my screen.

4) Bursting Pool/Subnet settings

People have always liked our pool/subnet shaping feature, but we often get asked by customers to relax enforcement during slack usage times. For example, if you have your guest wireless network restricted to 50 megabits on a 1G circuit on our 8.5 release, those users will never be able to go above 50 megabits. Now in 8.6, if you put a 50 megabit restriction on a group you can tell the NetEqualizer only to enforce that rule when the entire circuit is at capacity. With our 8.6 release, you have the choice of keeping the hard 50 megabit restriction in place all the time, or to only enforce this restriction during peak times.

As always, the 8.6 Release will be free to customers with valid NetEqualizer Software and Support (NSS) plans. Renew today if you are not current!