RE: "Packet Shapers"

["Christian Kuhtz" <ck () bellsouth net>]

[..]
> 14) Transparent proxy: remember that line of boxes?  firewall->packet
> shaper->router?  Now add in a transparent proxy.  Ugh.  Look for a
> vendor that will include a transparent proxy capability in their box.  I
> wouldn't be suprised if Alteon and Packeteer were to merge.  These kind
> of mergers have to happen.  Checkpoint already has packet shaping in
> their firewall via an addon product called Floodgate.  Cisco bought up
> Classdata (www.classdata.com) so expect to see more of these
> capabilities in firewalls and routers.

Err, CLASS Data Systems has very little to do with that for now.

Besides, you already have plenty of IP QoS mechanisms in cisco today, to
implement various queuing and drop policies based IP TOS, as well as
integrating technologies underneath IP to transfer IP QoS into the
underlying transport.  Most of what you guys talk about can be done on many
IOS platforms today without buying additional hardware.  Granted, you need
cisco hardware (or a mainframe for an OS/390 IOS stack :), but either way
you have the option of doing all that in a switch/router.

The methods discussed so far are certainly not scalable for large service
providers.  Btw: DS-3, IMHO, does not count as real true broadband.  T1's
are becoming a fairly small pipe, especially in the advent of technologies
such as DSL.  Which makes DS-3 the next best thing up the ladder, short of
buying a half a dozen or more DSL pipes.  DS-3's are what T1's are getting
to be.

There is a lot of good lit out from all the major vendors on the subject of
traffic shaping and engineering.  Why introduce yet another box into the
network?

Cheers,
Chris

--
Christian Kuhtz, BellSouth Corp., Sr. Network Architect  <ck () bellsouth net>
1100 Ashwood Parkway, Atlanta, GA 30338                        <ck () gnu org>