In answer to a question below about experience with similar products... Cisco IOS has the dynamic routing injection feature as part of recent IOS versions. The feature is now called Performance Routing (PfR) formerly known as OER (Optimized Edge Routing) and as of 12.4(24)T, it can optimize routing protocols other than BGP or static routes (called PIRO Protocol Independent Route Optimization), including IS-IS, OSPF and EIGRP. RIP folks should learn about routing protocols :-D PfR does not do compressions/tokenization of the data, so it has no Caching/compression/WAN Acceleration features, BUT it does do dynamic path re-routing based on your policy or observed metrics like latency, packet loss, jitter etc and can also do it based on observed Netflow data and automatic instatiation of IP SLA active probes to see what happens for a RTP data stream marked with dscp 46 or video stream marked with dscp 34 and so on. As of recent IOS versions (12,4(9)T + I think), it can control both inbound and outbound directions, and can do things like send your traffic to ISP X up to bandwidth Bx and then shift traffic over to ISP Y up to bandwidth By to do dynamic load sharing of traffic to IP transit commit levels.... Not a bad feature for free. Larger scale deployments should probably use a dedicated controller box making the re-routing decisions, but any WAN egress point to an Internet or private WAN provider is your "border" device used by the "master" to get information, setup probes and learn netflow data to make decisions. I've used it for testing purposes on enterprise WAN deployment and it works pretty well. We are planning on deploying on a production DMVPN solution when the MGRE bug below is resolved. My main beef is a bug related to use of PfR on mGRE tunnel interfaces and the memory-hog nature of the feature... It will detect your brown-out issues like increased packet loss for traffic through provider X that cause customers to call you about broken applications and will re-route the traffic so you may never even know there was an issue!! The solution is particularly good for enterprises with only a few WAN or Internet exits from a location and for dynamically load sharing traffic to paid-for commit levels to reduce recurring cost and get the most out of existing connectivity without paying burst charges. We've done testing on use for our internet border routing in the "advice" mode, where is just says what changes it would maek, without actually making the changes. Production deployment soon as part of the ever popular cost-reduction efforts currently in vogue in enterprises right now given the current economy. http://www.cisco.com/go/pfr There's some similar solutions out there.. RouteScience was mentioned, but I didn't see anyone mention InterNAP FCP, which is part of the basis for InterNAP's PNAP business model... They also sell it to others enterprises and ISPs. -----Original Message----- From: Ken A [mailto:ka@pacific.net] Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 9:18 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Redundant Array of Inexpensive ISP's? Tim Utschig wrote:

[Please reply off-list. I'll summarize back to the list if there is more than a little interest in me doing so.]

Please do. There are many rural ISPs and WISPs that might benefit from a decent look at these products, or any open source clones that might be available to test & refine these tricks. Pricing for even a fractional DS3 in the rural US is still very high. Being able to shift bandwidth from a colo facility in a large city to a remote site served by 3 or 4 consumer grade broadband links could be a helpful development, if the bottom line works out. Thanks, Ken

I'm curious if anyone has experience with products from Talari Networks, or anything similar, and would like to share. Did they live

up to your expectations? Caveats?

-- Ken Anderson Pacific Internet - http://www.pacific.net