I could easily choose the amount of data to display and sort it by clicking on any column. I was also able to drill down into each routable entity, which showed me a graph of the comparative performance among the local ISP links over time. In addition, for every change, I could drill into a detailed entry, including the most recent traceroute before the change. Clicking on respective icons on the top of the screen showed me the graphs of the latency and loss history, which conveniently defaulted to the last routable entity I had looked at.
I was able to click on a graph of the bandwidth history of the local ISP links that had been gathered using SNMP. This information can be used to configure the appliance to move the traffic to another link if a certain threshold is reached. This serves two purposes. If the local link is in danger of being saturated, you would want to move some traffic to an alternative link. But if your links have usage-based thresholds, you could balance the traffic to keep it under those thresholds as well. Because performance is being tracked, GlobalRoute has a list of routable entities that can be moved over without hurting performance.
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Vendor Information
GlobalRoute 2.0, starts at $1,200 per site per month for VPN configurations; $4,900 for full-route optimization. Sockeye Networks, (800) 874-3449, (781) 693-7000.
www.sockeye.com |
The Control
In addition to the baseline of routable entities Akamai provides, new entries can be added dynamically based on the NetFlow data collected on the routers. ASs or networks with the highest traffic are added to the monitored list. Sockeye also crunches the NetFlow data into reports that let you to see where most of your traffic is going; these reports depict traffic in hourly, daily and monthly peaks as well as cumulative percentages. You can add a routable entity and associated scan points manually. This is handy if you have big customers or even VPN users whose traffic you want to optimize.
Because GlobalRoute is a service, Sockeye owns and manages the appliance for you through carefully filtered, encrypted and authenticated connections from its own NOC (network operations center). This means Sockeye not only replaces failed appliances, but it stores backup configurations of the appliance on its site.
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