Intelligent Routing : RouteScience Path Control, SockEye and netVMG

**rabbit85** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

**spoon84713** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

Only way this thing could save you money is routing over your cheapest providers...which you dont need some expensive hardware to tell you which those are since you pay the bills on them each month. If you have uunet/mfn/xo, whats this machine going to do not send any down uunet since you told it it costs 3x as much as the other two? lol sorry, I probably just dont understand the point of these.

**spoon84713** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

Originally posted by nixboxen
Uh I wouldnt go so far as to say they're worthless, for your avg WHT user they would be worthless. Intelligent routing appliances are only for data centers for 3-7 Upstream providers, the reason they're very handy is because you can down to the bit control where each users data goes.

Say PapaSmurff wanted to buy 50GB of XO from me, and after that was gone he just wanted to soak TimeWarnertelecom from me for the rest of the month. -- Thats basically what the route science boxes do.

They will also detect trouble along any AS path outbound on your network and swap routes to compensate. Its very very sexy technology. You can tell it ok, every megabit i send down XO costs me X amount and every megabit i send down Saavis costs me x amount. so unless you have to send it all down (whatever) path.

Its not for your average dedicated hosting company, it would better suite a large data center, like what we are. Once we get our OC-3 to chicago installed we're putting one of these bad boys down there and lighting up probably 4 100 megabit ethernet connections.. should be niiice.

-Drew

Can't argue too much with that. But if you have Cisco gear why not just use the traffic engineering features the IOS provides? For example, unequal cost load balancing by using the BGP Link Bandwidth feature?
This feature will help you divide your traffic any way you want.
So 20% uses circuit A, 10% uses circuit B, 40% uses circuit C and 30% uses circuit D.
I'm just saying that the Internet seems to be doing fine without these "intelligent routing" boxes.What if the device *does* freak out and injects some screwed up route tables into your routers?

**spoon84713** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

We have been using FCP from NetVmg for about 8 months now and it's very nice.

The one thing you are not taking into account is network performance. BGP does not take performance into account at all. With all the providers out there cutting techincal staff, we are seeing more and more network issues across all networks (which BGP does not factor in).

These boxes take care of that! We used to get about 10-20 calls per month on "My connection to my machine is slow" or "My connection to my machine is spotty". Since NetVmg we have not had one single call.

It's bleeding edge technology, but you will see it as common place in the next couple of years.

**spoon84713** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

Originally posted by RackMy.com
We have been using FCP from NetVmg for about 8 months now and it's very nice.

The one thing you are not taking into account is network performance. BGP does not take performance into account at all. With all the providers out there cutting techincal staff, we are seeing more and more network issues across all networks (which BGP does not factor in).

These boxes take care of that! We used to get about 10-20 calls per month on "My connection to my machine is slow" or "My connection to my machine is spotty". Since NetVmg we have not had one single call.

It's bleeding edge technology, but you will see it as common place in the next couple of years.

Yeah, true.
But it makes more sense if the router manufacturers build this intelligence into their gear.
In the next couple of years I see Cisco, Lucent, Juniper, Foundry, etc.. buying or copying this technology and loading it into their routing products for increased value-add.
So I'm not getting too excited about it until this "bleeding" edge technology gets rolled into something larger.

**andy68** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

These things are great!

You can either get them in a strictly "PERFORMANCE" mode - it will do lots of calculations to make sure every bit of data is going via the best route, OR you can set it on PRICE - so that your making maximal savings at all times!

Great stuff.

**andy68** · 12-21-2008, 08:02 AM

Originally posted by dogzilla
These things are great!

You can either get them in a strictly "PERFORMANCE" mode - it will do lots of calculations to make sure every bit of data is going via the best route, OR you can set it on PRICE - so that your making maximal savings at all times!

Great stuff.

Well, I'm glad you think "these things are great". You'll be even more glad when the BGP protocol is updated and you can engineer your traffic based on "PERFORMANCE" and "PRICE" without paying a dime to the manufacturers of the "things"...