Hi,
As my Avaya CNA/Route Science box begins to seriously age, and without the support of Avaya for 'Service Provider' uses of the product, I have been looking for alternatives to the product.
The value we get from this product is mainly in the ability to easily manage our bandwidth commitments in a hands off way without having to manually manipulate anything. I have no real illusions that the 'performance' side of things is 'arguable' at best with these sorts of products due to the nature of the Internet.
Internap to me stands out as essentially the only alternative to this product, but they have been tremendously difficult to work with, they won't allow us to demo a unit to see if it offers the same functionality as our current solution. The reason they won't allow us to a demo a unit is because they 'don't stock them'. So basically they have 0 units until someone orders one, that is fine if that is their policy but that hasn't really been our experience with other hardware vendors that want close to 100K for a piece of niche equipment.
My questions are:
-What are other people doing who currently use or used the Avaya/RS product in the past?
-Does anyone know of any competition in this space (aside from hiring a guy that sits there and does this for us manually)?
-Has Cisco's OER/PFR made any progress in the last few years (is anyone using it?)
Sorry to disturb,
-Drew
Is your burstable bandwidth cost high enough to pay 100K for a gear
just to meet the commitments ? NAGIOS/CACTI monitoring alerts sent to
someone (which may be hired help from any place in the world) would
probably beat that in cost effectiveness.
The performance requirement is where a line is drawn between manual
configuration and automated BGP manipulation.
Rubens
The ability to manage bandwidth over multiple ISP links each of which
may charge variable rates per Mb, and also be billed by the 95th
percentile billing method, is the main justification for a device like
the Routescience product. In my experience ROI is captured in a
relatively short time. Since Routescience uses the second and third
packets of the TCP 3-way handshake to calculate the fastest route to
destination prefixes, then this is an added bonus to the ability to dial
bandwidth up or down over numerous ISP links.
Also Routescience-type devices free up the person who sits and
calculates BGP best routes manually, so that person can perform more
productive and efficient work in other areas.
Drew Weaver wrote:
Hi,
As my Avaya CNA/Route Science box begins to seriously age, and without the support of Avaya for 'Service Provider' uses of the product, I have been looking for alternatives to the product.
The value we get from this product is mainly in the ability to easily manage our bandwidth commitments in a hands off way without having to manually manipulate anything. I have no real illusions that the 'performance' side of things is 'arguable' at best with these sorts of products due to the nature of the Internet.
Internap to me stands out as essentially the only alternative to this product, but they have been tremendously difficult to work with, they won't allow us to demo a unit to see if it offers the same functionality as our current solution. The reason they won't allow us to a demo a unit is because they 'don't stock them'. So basically they have 0 units until someone orders one, that is fine if that is their policy but that hasn't really been our experience with other hardware vendors that want close to 100K for a piece of niche equipment.
My questions are:
-What are other people doing who currently use or used the Avaya/RS product in the past?
-Does anyone know of any competition in this space (aside from hiring a guy that sits there and does this for us manually)?
-Has Cisco's OER/PFR made any progress in the last few years (is anyone using it?)
We use the Avaya CNA in one data center and it does an excellent job at
both commit management and rerouting around problems. I almost never
see tickets regarding latency/packet loss at that data center except
when it involves inbound issues that the CNA can't fix. Other data
centers have a more typical occurrence of routing issues that require
manual intervention.
Most of the parts to replace this exist in open source software today:
bird/quagga for bgp to import routes and inject re-routes.
net-snmp-utils for importing interface stats/state and bgp session state
various performance testing tools [tcp]traceroute/mtr etc.
netflow tools (like ehnt) to receive netflow data
The parts that are missing:
api for bird/quagga to import and assert routes
code to use netflow to generate list of targets for performance testing
and to determine bandwidth/route for commit management
code to decide which routes to assert to which next-hop based on configured performance and commit levels.
reporting
None of that seems very tricky, especially the commit management which
does not need a sophisticated performance evaluation, just "does it
work at all via that link."
- Kevin