Comments or suggestions required Internap FCP 500 vs. OER

Thu Nov 10 03:12:45 UTC 2005

> We're looking at possibly purchasing a Internap FCP500,
> everything I hear about these boxes is good. We are simultaneously

I have no experience with OER, but I have had a FCP5000 for a while now.  We 
have numerous transit links, all of which have significantly more burst 
capacity than we actually use (or commit to).  To some extent it is a bit 
magical and I don't always understand how it decides the "target" traffic 
level for a link, but in general it works great.  Since installing it we've 
pretty much done away with any other regular BGP changes to balance traffic. 
It does a good job of keeping out many transit links all below commit unless 
total traffic exceeds all commits.

In general, I'm skeptical that it is really providing much of a performance 
boost.  However, it does a good job at balancing traffic levels and that is 
the main value we get from the product.  It was basically a "fire and 
forget" system.  Once installed, we were able to just forget about traffic 
engineering and only touch things when adding/removing a link (or for 
special situations like manually routing around bad paths).

If you'd like technical information about how it works or the potential 
scaling issues that can result let me know what you're interested in and I 
can expand a bit. 