looking for a review of traffic shapers

Wed Nov 26 19:33:00 UTC 2003

Check out http://www.ellacoya.com/products/products.html.

They are tried and true. Their deep packet inspection to pick up all known 
P2P for example works extremely well.

Regards,

Timo

At 01:35 PM 26/11/2003 -0500, Peter Murray wrote:

>(caveat: I am not in sales - I'm a very happy PacketShaper user.)
>
>Traffic shaping comes in many shapes and forms. Many places who need to do
>traffic shaping need to do it down to the application level, so those apps
>that are of a mission-critical nature get through, while those that can
>wait are made to wait.
>
>Trouble with the 'diskless' units is a) they can't distinguish enough
>different applications to really be useful, b) they don't have control
>over the incoming traffic, and c) they can't provide you with a historical
>trend analysis (or event analysis) to correlate with issues that may be
>happening on the network. Most make use of queueing, which can only
>provide some control for outbound traffic, and at worst can lead to
>further retransmissions and thus further congestion.
>
>The CMU study between the Allot and the Packeteer devices was not well
>done, and I would encourage you to look further at each of these devices -
>especially since a full year has passed since those reports, and that the
>testing didn't even look at the rate-limiting features of them, which is
>what would make all the difference.
>
>Certainly, the shaping devices out there are not inexpensive, but a box
>that can shape 10MBit of traffic, broken out to over 500 different
>classes, a PacketShaper 2500 can be had for well under US$10000.
>
>The ROI on these devices is proven, and depending on the scenario, it can
>be months, not years before the device has paid for itself. In many
>situations, it is the *only* solution to keeping control of
>ever-increasing bandwidth demands in non-ISP (just move packets as fast as
>possible) environments.
>
>I would be more than happy to discuss my experiences with these units.
>
>-Peter
>
>Peter Murray
>Pittsburgh, PA
>
>On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, William Caban wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 13:38, andrew at vivalibre.com wrote:
> > > Note: delurk.
> > >
> > > Some of the commercial traffic shaping devices reviewed here are tens of
> > > thousands of dollars.  For a smaller ISP (i.e. less than a DS3 of
> > > aggregate upstream bandwidth), that kind of expense doesn't make sense--
> > > but the need to control bandwidth consumption is still an issue.
> > >
>[snip]
> > >
> > > Is anyone on the NANOG list aware of a disk-less Linux solution? One 
> might
> > > imagine a Knoppix-like bootable CD image (perhaps CD-RW, so config files
> > > could be updated) that would turn an inexpensive Linux box into an
> > > effective traffic shaping device, using tools like CBQinit, MRTG/RRDTOOL,
> > > and a Webmin-like admin interface. The closest thing to this I've seen is
> > > ETINC's BWMGR, but that's a closed-source solution and is still somewhat
> > > expensive.
> > >
> > > -Andrew White