Redundant Array of Inexpensive ISP's?

Fri Mar 13 05:20:41 UTC 2009

In answer to a question below about experience with similar products...
Cisco IOS has the dynamic routing injection feature as part of recent
IOS versions. 

The feature is now called Performance Routing (PfR) formerly known as
OER (Optimized Edge Routing) and as of 12.4(24)T, it can optimize
routing protocols other than BGP or static routes (called PIRO  Protocol
Independent Route Optimization), including IS-IS, OSPF and EIGRP.  RIP
folks should learn about routing protocols :-D

PfR does not do compressions/tokenization of the data, so it has no
Caching/compression/WAN Acceleration features, BUT it does do dynamic
path re-routing based on your policy or observed metrics like latency,
packet loss, jitter etc and can also do it based on observed Netflow
data and automatic instatiation of IP SLA active probes to see what
happens for a RTP data stream marked with dscp 46  or video stream
marked with dscp 34 and so on.   As of recent IOS versions (12,4(9)T + I
think), it can control both inbound and outbound directions, and can do
things like send your traffic to ISP X up to bandwidth Bx and then shift
traffic over to ISP Y up to bandwidth By  to do dynamic load sharing of
traffic to IP transit commit levels.... Not a bad feature for free.
Larger scale deployments should probably use a dedicated controller box
making the re-routing decisions, but any WAN egress point to an Internet
or private WAN provider is your "border" device used by the "master" to
get information, setup probes and learn netflow data to make decisions.

I've used it for testing purposes on enterprise WAN deployment and it
works pretty well.  We are planning on deploying on a production DMVPN
solution when the MGRE bug below is resolved.  My main beef is a bug
related to use of PfR on mGRE tunnel interfaces and the memory-hog
nature of the feature... It will detect your brown-out issues like
increased packet loss for traffic through provider X that cause
customers to call you about broken applications and will re-route the
traffic so you may never even know there was an issue!!  The solution is
particularly good for enterprises with only a few WAN or Internet exits
from a location and for dynamically load sharing traffic to paid-for
commit levels to reduce recurring cost and get the most out of existing
connectivity without paying burst charges.  We've done testing on use
for our internet border routing in the "advice" mode, where is just says
what changes it would maek, without actually making the changes.
Production deployment soon as part of the ever popular cost-reduction
efforts currently in vogue in enterprises right now given the current
economy.

http://www.cisco.com/go/pfr

There's some similar solutions out there.. RouteScience was mentioned,
but I didn't see anyone mention InterNAP FCP, which is part of the basis
for InterNAP's PNAP business model... They also sell it to others
enterprises and ISPs. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken A [mailto:ka at pacific.net] 
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9:18 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Redundant Array of Inexpensive ISP's?

Tim Utschig wrote:
> [Please reply off-list.  I'll summarize back to the list if there is 
> more than a little interest in me doing so.]
> 

Please do. There are many rural ISPs and WISPs that might benefit from a
decent look at these products, or any open source clones that might be
available to test & refine these tricks.

Pricing for even a fractional DS3 in the rural US is still very high. 
Being able to shift bandwidth from a colo facility in a large city to a
remote site served by 3 or 4 consumer grade broadband links could be a
helpful development, if the bottom line works out.

Thanks,
Ken

> I'm curious if anyone has experience with products from Talari 
> Networks, or anything similar, and would like to share.  Did they live

> up to your expectations?  Caveats?
> 

--
Ken Anderson
Pacific Internet - http://www.pacific.net