Load balancing outgoing connections automatically.

Fri Dec 3 15:06:55 UTC 2004

Internap's (Sockeye/netVmg's) "FCP" Flow Contorl Platform might do the trick
for you-
Keith Wallace
  _____  

From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] 
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 9:53 AM
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Load balancing outgoing connections automatically.

            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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