Internap route optimization

Thu Nov 5 11:17:33 UTC 2015

TL;DR: Not worth it unless you have only a few transit providers and are a content-heavy network with little inbound traffic.

We used the Internap FCP for a long time (10 or so years). In general, we were satisfied with it, but honestly, after not having it in our network for the past year and a half, we really don't notice a difference. We primarily purchased it to keep transit costs down, but as we kept boosting our minimums with providers, it became less and less about transit costs and more about performance.

Boxes like these really work best if your network is a content-heavy network (more outbound than inbound). Sure, it will route around poorly performing paths, but IMO it's not worth the money and yearly maintenance fees just for this. I always said that it must be doing a good job since we never got complaints about packet loss in an upstream network, but now that the device is gone, we still don't get complaints about packet loss in an upstream's network. :-/

The biggest problem that we found was that it just was not actively developed (at the time, not sure about now). New software features were non-existent for years. Bugs were not fixed in a timely manner. Given what we were paying in yearly maintenance fees, it just wasn't worth it to keep around. It also wasn't scalable as we kept adding more transit interfaces, given that there were a fixed amount of capture ports. Adding non-transit peering into the mix was also complicated and messed with the route decision algorithms. Maybe things have changed.

As far as technicals, it seemed to work fine. One of the really only annoying things about it were remote users who think that a UDP packet hitting their firewall from its automatic traceroute mechanism were 'DDoS' and threats of lawyers/the wrath of god almighty would come down upon us for sending unauthorized packets to their precious and delicate network. You would definitely also want to make sure that you filter announcements so you don't accidentally start sending longer paths to your upstreams or customer peers, but if you run BGP, you already do that, amirite?!

-evt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Paras
> Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 3:04 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Internap route optimization
> 
> Does anyone know or have any experience with Internap's route
> optimization? Is it any good?
> 
> I've heard of competing solutions as well, such as the one provided by
> Noction.
> 
> Thanks for your input,
> Paras