Load balancing outgoing connections automatically.

Fri Dec 3 14:53:07 UTC 2004

            Howdy. We're looking at upgrading our border router(s) from
7500s to (something) yet undetermined. What we would like to do is
perhaps find a platform that is smart enough to not route more outgoing
traffic across a circuit than it can handle. We have 4 outgoing links to
the net at the moment. They all have the same amount of bandwidth, BGP
tends to want to send all of the traffic out to the same two, so usually
those two will carry 80-90% of our traffic while the other two will
carry like 20-30% combined. So if the first two connections burst up a
little bit, sometimes it can cause congestion its fairly rare; but any
congestion is unacceptable as you all know.

 I know the way BGP works, it will use it rules to determine the way
traffic will go.  I was wondering if anyone has heard of any good ways
to handle this becoming more well known within the last year or so I
researched this last year and found that prepending and doing things
manually is pretty much the only way to load balance it. (i.e. manually
setting routes based on the best paths through our upstreams for each
connected network) I really just want to tell my router to load balance
it; since that is kind of what I'm paying $100,000 for in the first
place, no? I've also heard of gear from companies like route science
that could possibly achieve the same thing. But I've heard that it runs
like $300,000 for a box, is there anything a bit smaller for companies
within the oc-3 range? That could accompany my router?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-Drew

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