Still, though there's only one Internet, you can take steps to provide diversity and redundancy, the keys to reliability on any network. How? Use multiple ISPs to provide redundant and diverse paths from end to end. Granted, this isn't an inexpensive proposition, and you'll need to do your homework to ensure that the providers you're considering have truly divergent physical paths. But there are devices that will help make the most of your investment; these route optimizers not only will maximize performance, they also can help honor usage thresholds and ensure your providers are living up to their SLAs. We tested devices from RouteScience Technologies, Internap Network Services (formerly NetVmg), Radware and F5 Networks (see "Mapping Out the Best Route,") and found that, if you can handle the complexity of BGP, Internap's FCP 100 has an outstanding mix of features, functionality and management. If DNS is more your speed, Radware's LinkProof was manageable and scalable.
Internet route-optimization products are only part of the solution, according to Peter Sevcik, president of NetForecast, a network technology consultancy that helps clients deal with application performance over the Internet. More can be done beyond improving raw performance over the Internet, and improvements are needed, he says, even though your overall performance picture may seem quite rosy. That's because many of the statistics that we see showing Internet latency and packet loss are averages, with a wide spectrum of performance among customers accessing any given Web site. Sevcik has done studies (available at www.netforecast.com) that show there will always be a group of clients receiving very poor performance, even though the average numbers may look quite good.
So what can be done beyond optimization? Sevcik is a big believer in using content-delivery networks, like Akamai's, as well as products and services that make more efficient use of network resources, such as accelerators from NetScaler, Peribit Networks and Redline Networks. He also advocates optimizing applications so that they are less dependent on the Internet's performance because, in the end, we can speed the Internet up only so much.
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