[c-nsp] Bandwidth Management Appliance from Emerging Technologies Inc.

[Mark Tinka]

On Sunday 25 April 2010 03:26:14 pm Ziv Leyes wrote:

> I've had some experience with their products 10 years ago
>  and recently during last year again.

Same here, I used their products about the same time before 
and a few times in recent years. However, as I've been 
working with networks pushing way more bandwidth (and 
devising more complex business models), using bandwidth 
managers of any kind has been relegated to what the routers 
can handle on their line cards, i.e., we dropped them 
altogether.

ET's products are great, but from experience, you want to 
look out for the following:

	- As late as '07, they didn't support inspection of IP
	  addresses in MPLS-encapsulated IP packets. This makes
	  bandwidth management in an MPLS path impossible (traffic
	  just goes through not adhering to policy).

	- As of '07, they didn't support bandwidth management of
	  IPv6 packets (same effect as MPLS frames).

	- As of '07, there was no sane way to co-ordinate
	  synchronization of multiple bandwidth manager deployments
	  so that load balanced or asymmetric traffic could not
	  "hide" from (some of) the bandwidth managers.

	- Port density was a bit of an issue on their largest
	  platforms if the systems were to be deployed within the
	  core. I can't open their web site from here, but their
	  support for 10Gbps makes me curious.

>  Their products are
>  fine, they do exactly what the claim they do, the
>  pricing is reasonable,...

Agree.

For IPv4, non-MPLS-enabled networks handling less than 1Gbps 
(the systems I tested back then), they definitely offer more 
bang-for-the-buck than Allot, Xedia and all the other 
traditional jobs.

But...

>  but for some reason I keep
>  getting the impression the company works in a kinda
>  "garage band" method, every time you contact their
>  support (online only) is through a forum and always the
>  same guy answers you. I don't know how after over 10
>  years the company exists they're still giving the
>  impression they've just started...

... yes, you're right - the developer is the seller is the 
support guy is everything.

Overall, support is terrible if you're the lazy type, 
because he has no time for folk who haven't bothered to read 
up on all the details about the product, i.e., he has no 
time to teach. However, he will help you if you ask the 
right questions.

He is often rude, but more so if your questions seem silly 
and/or have already been covered by the manual, FAQ, forum, 
e.t.c.

But from a product quality perspective, for what they 
advertise, they most certainly deliver. I just think, for 
very large, highly-distributed networks, it may not be a 
scalable approach, as is the case with any appliance-based 
bandwidth manager.

The systems are based on FreeBSD (as of '07, the systems ran 
very early versions of it, but that isn't a real problem as 
it's customized to do so, securely), and come in SuperMicro 
x86 chassis'. It can be delivered as an application to 
install on your own, but that's not always recommended.

As for Linux, you can boot SuSE Linux. Don't know if that's 
still the case. I always went with FreeBSD.

We had a unit that was sensitive and always rebooted when we 
plugged in the VGA cable at the back. This could have been a 
faulty motherboard, so check your system the moment it 
arrives.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Mark.
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