At 1:29 PM +0000 10/24/02, Vern Stitt wrote: >As an alternative, Radware offers the LinkProof which also allows multiple >ISPs without using BGP. Their box is a more robust ASIC based design rather >than a PC. The same hardware is also used in their FireProof and Web Server >Director (WSD) products. > There are several such boxes on the market, but not a huge amount of operational experience. Believe me, people in the IETF and NANOG are very interested to see if they work. Often, the box does speak BGP to the outside (I can't speak to Radware) but it's transparent to the user.
One of the major scalability problems in the global Internet is user-level multihoming, so non-BGP solutions might be very welcome. There certainly aren't any substantial discussions in the IETF or IRTF about this, other than in midboxes (load-sharing NAT), some of which still need to listen passively to BGP. I am assuming that the proposed product does optimal route selection, not just failover. If the box doesn't speak BGP, be sure to find out how it decides on the preferred ISP. There are several possible strategies: delay either to the POP or to selected destinations, utilization on the links to the various POPs (obviously this needs to be corrected for speed if different), etc. Some Cisco solutions such as Distributed Director get various information from routers in the various paths. That may require limited BGP. There are assortments of solutions from various vendors that load-balance based on your server loading, but to affect inbound traffic, they have to speak some BGP or use much slower DNS. But I'd be very interested in knowing how a box can know optimal routes without either listening to BGP, doing active probes, or distributing load by knowing server load. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=56226&t=55918 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
