"Packet Shapers"

Fri Jul 31 10:26:08 UTC 1998

On Fri, 31 Jul 1998, Christian Kuhtz wrote:

> [..]
> > 14) Transparent proxy: remember that line of boxes?  firewall->packet
> > shaper->router?  Now add in a transparent proxy.  Ugh.  Look for a
> > vendor that will include a transparent proxy capability in their box.  I
> > wouldn't be suprised if Alteon and Packeteer were to merge.  These kind
> > of mergers have to happen.  Checkpoint already has packet shaping in
> > their firewall via an addon product called Floodgate.  Cisco bought up
> > Classdata (www.classdata.com) so expect to see more of these
> > capabilities in firewalls and routers.
> 
> Err, CLASS Data Systems has very little to do with that for now.
> 
> Besides, you already have plenty of IP QoS mechanisms in cisco today, to
> implement various queuing and drop policies based IP TOS, as well as
> integrating technologies underneath IP to transfer IP QoS into the
> underlying transport.  Most of what you guys talk about can be done on many
> IOS platforms today without buying additional hardware.  Granted, you need
> cisco hardware (or a mainframe for an OS/390 IOS stack :), but either way
> you have the option of doing all that in a switch/router.
> 
> The methods discussed so far are certainly not scalable for large service
> providers.  Btw: DS-3, IMHO, does not count as real true broadband.  T1's
> are becoming a fairly small pipe, especially in the advent of technologies
> such as DSL.  Which makes DS-3 the next best thing up the ladder, short of
> buying a half a dozen or more DSL pipes.  DS-3's are what T1's are getting
> to be.
> 
> There is a lot of good lit out from all the major vendors on the subject of
> traffic shaping and engineering.  Why introduce yet another box into the
> network?

Not everyone has Cisco, and the QA on Cisco releases has not been the
greatest.  Bash in all of the above into IOS and how much you wanna bet
that we will need version (19cc) before all the components work (i.e. FR,
SNMP, HSSI, PPP, BGP, etc.)  Each of us has slowed down in installing new
versions in critical systems due to these numerous bugs and flaws.

Cisco has WCCP but yet many people prefer Alteon or Intokomi (sp?).  Ask
yourself why.

You are on the mark in regards to OC-3 being too small these days.  None
of these boxes scale to OC-12; neither do firewalls.  Wouldn't be suprised
if some Pluris or Juniper came out with some MPP box that can do all of
the above. 

-Hank

> 
> Cheers,
> Chris
> 
> --
> Christian Kuhtz, BellSouth Corp., Sr. Network Architect  <ck at bellsouth.net>
> 1100 AshwoodParkway, Atlanta, GA 30338                        <ck at gnu.org>
> 

Hank Nussbacher