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Kishore Chennupati wrote:
Joe,
you seem to be a big champion of OER/PfR . seen u suggest this in heaps of posts lately
Kishore
That's true, but then there seems to be more posts opened on load balancing/sharing too.
The reason I champion this technology, my background is in software development, so I appreciate what computer automation can do to improve certain situations. Using routing "intelligence" to pick the best performing path(s) appears to be the next logical progression, i.e. static routing => dynamic routing => performance routing.
I'm not using this technology at my current job , but at my prior job I configured OER to support 60 some international sites with dual L3 VPN (MPLS) clouds. It dealt with some intractable performance issues, like poor performance across part of a MPLS vendors infrastructure, which could be critical supporting things like VoIP. The biggest initial complaint I got was the network management people no longer "seeing" WAN performance issues - . Seriously, this was a problem as we did want to know there was a WAN cloud issue, we just didn't want it to impact our actual traffic. (Solution was two fold, have network management SLA tests not processed by OER and analyze what OER was doing.)
OER/PfR is impressive stuff - there are a couple of "gotchas" you can bump into, and it's still early in its life cycle, so you may want to avoid it if you need 100% predictability. Of course, 100% "traditional" predictability also can mean such-and-such happens and performance and/or the network drops. A real example, one day one of our MPLS vendors nodal locations started to black hole all traffic, but routing looked fine. It took hours to manually identify where the problem was and manually re-route to avoid the problem. OER/PfR can detect and route around an issue like this in seconds.
