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
Hi,
No particular experience with Internaps optimization...however I wouldn't be that sure if I would use it within our networks, because you always have the conflict of this not being their core business as they want to sell their optimized IP transit.
However, some time ago we tried Border6 in an evaluation and then finally put it into production. Not only the optimization is nice, but the reporting is so extremely detailed making it very transparent where the transit has congestion issues and which prefix is routed (in and out) through which upstream.
For sure traffic engineering/optimization is not a trivial task but requires deep thinking and understanding of the whole BGP and routing picture.
Also, please, if you use one of this sort of device filter your
prefixes toward your customers/peers/transits... Do not be the next
person to leak their internap-box-routes to the world, m'kay? 
Totally right! That's why I wrote
>> For sure traffic engineering/optimization is not a trivial task but requires
>> deep thinking and understanding of the whole BGP and routing picture.
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
Just to be clear, Internap's solution doesn't use "more specifics" to steer
traffic. The mechanisms in place to protect yourself from normal route
leaking should apply just the same.
--chip
Keep in mind that most do not optimize inbound traffic, only outbound.
Hey Mike,
do you know route optimizers that actually do optimize inbound traffic?
We, at datapath.io, are currently working on this and could not find
another one that does it.
Best,
Sebastian
Border6 offers such an option based on prependings and bgp communities. But honestly, I didn't test that feature yet. And I'm not that sure how much sense it makes since it probably requires quite a lot global BGP updates... makes routers even more busy than they are currently.
A few years ago I had a couple boxes in a datacenter in Chicago that had
its traffic optimized by Internap. Latency wise, it was always the lowest
to my other applications, compared to other locations I had on-line. I am
not sure what other benefits it brought aside from lower latency. One thing
to remember is that they had several uplinks, so if you only have a couple
I can't imagine the impact to be great.
Just my 2cents.