agreed. i see the most benefit from these boxes geared towards networks with critical apps that are latency intensive and more than a handful of transit providers than i do for a smaller provider.. depending on how many upstreams you're juggling, its not that hard to create some traffic engineering policies that can easily be modified, (whether by hand or you use a script with a front end that can push the changes for you) in order to re-route traffic in the event of issues with an SP network in your end to end path.. personally i think manual traffic engineering and re-routing is one of the more fun parts of engineering.. -christian On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Robert E. Seastrom <rs@seastrom.com> wrote:
Eric Van Tol <eric@atlantech.net> writes:
I'd like to hire that engineer, please. Can you send me his resume? Here's the job description:
- Required to works 24x7x365. - Must monitor all network egress points to examine latency, retransmissions, packet loss, link utilization, and link cost. - Required to "tweak localpref" on an average of 5000 prefixes per day, based upon a combination of the above criteria. - Required to write up a daily, weekly, and monthly report to be sent to all managers on said schedule. - Must not require health or dental care.
These devices are not a replacement for an actual engineer. They are a supplement to the network to assist the engineer in doing what he should be doing - engineering and planning as opposed to resolving some other network's packet loss/blackhole/peering dispute/latency problem.
You can certainly get close to the requirements stated above by offering a decent salary and hiring a reasonably clued engineer with an SP background. You may have to settle for IRC, WoW, or SecondLife as daily recreational activity that doesn't buy you much (expressed in your requirements list as "tweaking localpref").
My general experience with such boxes is that they're awfully good at impressing the PHBs, but not something you can really defend from a cost/benefit perspective. I really do need to go into the "custom painted boxes with LCD screens on the front" business. I could make "melons", like Tom Vu.
---Rob
-- ^christian$