RE: Internap route optimization

[Eric Van Tol <eric () atlantech net>]

TL;DR: Not worth it unless you have only a few transit providers and are a content-heavy network with little inbound 
traffic.

We used the Internap FCP for a long time (10 or so years). In general, we were satisfied with it, but honestly, after 
not having it in our network for the past year and a half, we really don't notice a difference. We primarily purchased 
it to keep transit costs down, but as we kept boosting our minimums with providers, it became less and less about 
transit costs and more about performance.

Boxes like these really work best if your network is a content-heavy network (more outbound than inbound). Sure, it 
will route around poorly performing paths, but IMO it's not worth the money and yearly maintenance fees just for this. 
I always said that it must be doing a good job since we never got complaints about packet loss in an upstream network, 
but now that the device is gone, we still don't get complaints about packet loss in an upstream's network. :-/

The biggest problem that we found was that it just was not actively developed (at the time, not sure about now). New 
software features were non-existent for years. Bugs were not fixed in a timely manner. Given what we were paying in 
yearly maintenance fees, it just wasn't worth it to keep around. It also wasn't scalable as we kept adding more transit 
interfaces, given that there were a fixed amount of capture ports. Adding non-transit peering into the mix was also 
complicated and messed with the route decision algorithms. Maybe things have changed.

As far as technicals, it seemed to work fine. One of the really only annoying things about it were remote users who 
think that a UDP packet hitting their firewall from its automatic traceroute mechanism were 'DDoS' and threats of 
lawyers/the wrath of god almighty would come down upon us for sending unauthorized packets to their precious and 
delicate network. You would definitely also want to make sure that you filter announcements so you don't accidentally 
start sending longer paths to your upstreams or customer peers, but if you run BGP, you already do that, amirite?!

-evt

> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces () nanog org] On Behalf Of Paras
> Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 3:04 AM
> To: nanog () nanog org
> Subject: Internap route optimization
>
> Does anyone know or have any experience with Internap's route
> optimization? Is it any good?
>
> I've heard of competing solutions as well, such as the one provided by
> Noction.
>
> Thanks for your input,
> Paras