Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : QOSWorks vs. PacketShaper

[allan]

We are looking for a better way to monitor the bandwidth on our dedicated servers. Right now we are doing it at the switch level, but I feel like eventually this could cause performance degradation on the switches.

So, I was thinking of off-loading the work to either:

The Packeteer PacketShaper

Sitara Networks QOSWorks

I was wondering if anyone here has had any exeprience with either product, and what you think about them?

[Edited by uuallan on 02-27-2001 at 03:10 PM]

[cbaker17]

We too would have a int. in knowing feedback for apps that will monitor and report bandwidth, we are also looking for a solution that will allow customers to view their bandwidth usage.

[cperciva]

What's wrong with ipfw? It counts packets and bytes, and you can set rules as fine-grained as you like.

Just a couple days ago I wrote some code to report daily (via email) the incoming/outgoing bandwidth of a server, but it could equally well have reported in/out FTP/telnet/SSH/DNS/HTTP/SMTP/POP3/other TCP/UDP/ICMP separately. Or track each IP address separately too, for that matter.

[allan]

cperciva,

There's nothing wrong with it, per se. However, there is a finite amount of time in a day. I am the network admin, and one of two server admins for our quickly growing web farm. It makes more sense to spend the extra money to get an appliance-type server than it would to spend a couple of weeks figuring out firewall code. Especially, since my background is in servers and networking -- not firewalls .

[cperciva]

If all you want to do is count bytes in and bytes out, you hardly have to be an expert in firewalls:

ipfw add 1 count ip from any to any in
ipfw add 2 count ip from any to any out

is sufficient. Parsing the ipfw output and sending a daily report is a mere 40 lines in total. It seems silly to buy some expensive hardware to do what can be done in 40 lines of code.

Of course, this requires that you trust the server... if you don't trust the server you obviously need a separate solution.

[allan]

Actually, we are looking for something to do rate shaping, not byte counting.

[allan]

After doing a lot of research between the two products, we decided on neither. We are already pushing out close to 10 megs from our dedicated clients, and that would cost $10k for something that we would grow out of in a couple of months (assuming we continue to grow ).

Instead, I think I am going to opt for the Imagestream Internet Solutions Gateway Router:
http://www.imagestream-is.com/Gatewa..._Features.html

Its Linux based, which is nice, but still primarily a router, so it should be invisible to our clients. The configuration options look easy, and the cost is less than half the cost of the other solutions we looked at.

[Vorlon]

I am curious uuallan, What options you would use and a general text schematic for your particular setup.

i.e. Imagestream with 2 WAN ports (what type) what other options are you considering etc. I appreciate your technical expertise and am learning much from your posts.

Thanks

[allan]

The way we are setup is with 10 Racks in a UUNET data center. We segment off our shared customers, our infrastructure servers and our dedicated customers, to better manage bandwdith.

Each rack in the data center has a Cisco 2924 that directs traffic to a another 2924 which sends it to a pair of Cisco 3620's each with a handoff to seperate upstream switch in the data center (at least that's what they tell me ). The routers are configured with HSRP, which gives us pretty good failover.

So, if we opt to implement the ImageStream router, it would be with two 100 Meg NICs.

The current look is something like this (keep in mind this is conceptual, the racks are not really near each other ):

              | <-100 Meg H.Off-> |
           [Cisco 3620]--[Cisco 3620]
                    |       |
                    |       |
                  [Cisco 2924]
                        |
                        |
                  [Cisco 2924]
                        |
                     [Server]

In this case, I would put the ImageStream Router between the two 2924's and allow it to filter its traffic at that level.

For right now, I am not considering any other options...I would like to get an eval box from them to play with, but I don't think that's gonna happen . Sucks to be small .

[Vorlon]

Thanks for the schematic
Hope Im not too nosey but I noticed your company includes 256K bandwitdh with it's ded. servers. How do you control the bandwidth now? Is the 3620 router handling this issue currently?

[allan]

Originally posted by Vorlon

Hope Im not too nosey but I noticed your company includes 256K bandwitdh with it's ded. servers. How do you control the bandwidth now? Is the 3620 router handling this issue currently?

Exactly ! Which is why I want to off-load this work to another device. Technically we should be able to push 40-40 Megs of continuous bandwidth through the 3620s, but not if we keep creating new rate shaping instances.

Let me know if there is anything else I can help with.

[Vorlon]

You mentioned the ImageStream Router, have you looked at the Bandwidth management stuff from Emerging Technologies etinc.com. For about $3K they clain 150Mbps routing.

1. How does that compare with price performance of Image Stream.
2. Does anyone have any opinions concerning these two vendors or a strong preferance for another.

Trying to get as much info before committing the capital.

Thanks again.

[allan]

It looks like the Emerging Technologies solution is a Webmin Interface to IPChains.

Which is basically what you are going to get from ImageStream (just without the GUI ). So the answer depends on which company is using the best equipment.

I've never heard of Emerging Technologies, but it looks like they have a really nice product. I am definitely going to get some more information about it .

Thanks for the excellent tip!