On Thursday, July 26, 2012 09:45:14 PM Jason Lixfeld wrote:

Is that a lot to ask for one box? The ridiculously deep buffers required in order to shape to PIR vs. police to it (because policing to a PIR is just plain ugly) and the requirements to perform any sort of preferential packet treatment above and beyond that seem like quite a lot to ask of one box. Am I wrong?

Having used middleware in the past to do bandwidth management, this doesn't scale well when your network grows, and when off-net traffic (including that between your own customers) is coming in from several points in the backbone. On smaller networks, having middleware is easy because your exit points are finite and fairly static. When you grow and start peering, taking on several large customers that want to talk to each other across your network, middleware becomes cumbersome to deploy, because then not only can't you assume that 80% of your traffic is HTTP, but you also can't assume that 80% of your traffic is toward your upstreams. Moreover, adding redundancy (as in multiple links between routers/switches) makes the situation worse, because middleware might not be as inclined, and arbitration of bandwidth management across multiple middleware devices to avoid accidentally over-provisioning to customers gets expensive and complex. I've since migrated to performing bandwidth management in the router gear itself. This is easy if you're using high- end kit (think Juniper M/MX/T, Cisco ASR1000/9000), but significantly less so on wireline Metro-E networks (where your Active-E comes in). But not anymore - there have been meaningful developments in this area, and for some I've had the pleasure of deploying, e.g., Cisco's ME3600X/3800X. There also alternatives like Juniper's MX80 (too big, I think, but the smallest you can get from them now) and Brocade's NetIron CES/CER2000 units. These allow you to not only gain decent feature set in the Access, but also let you extend IP (and MPLS) into the edge too for additional simplicity. Hope this helps. Cheers Mark.