Howdy. We’re looking at upgrading our border router(s) from 7500s to (something) yet undetermined. What we would like to do is perhaps find a platform that is smart enough to not route more outgoing traffic across a circuit than it can handle. We have 4 outgoing links to the net at the moment. They all have the same amount of bandwidth, BGP tends to want to send all of the traffic out to the same two, so usually those two will carry 80-90% of our traffic while the other two will carry like 20-30% combined. So if the first two connections burst up a little bit, sometimes it can cause congestion its fairly rare; but any congestion is unacceptable as you all know.

 I know the way BGP works, it will use it rules to determine the way traffic will go.  I was wondering if anyone has heard of any good ways to handle this becoming more well known within the last year or so I researched this last year and found that prepending and doing things manually is pretty much the only way to load balance it. (i.e. manually setting routes based on the best paths through our upstreams for each connected network) I really just want to tell my router to load balance it; since that is kind of what I’m paying $100,000 for in the first place, no? I’ve also heard of gear from companies like route science that could possibly achieve the same thing. But I’ve heard that it runs like $300,000 for a box, is there anything a bit smaller for companies within the oc-3 range? That could accompany my router?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-Drew