Easing Backbone Traffic By Scanning The Net

A reader writes "Of the schemes being concocted to ease traffic among Internet backbone providers, InterNap Network Services Corp. may have the most ambitious: a setup that bypasses the peering process entirely by scanning the Net for optimal routes. EEtimes has the full story on their plan."

Akamai does much the same

internally for optimal routes in their cache hierarchy, and also as a hook into their modified bind (or whatever named they're using) so that www.ak.customer.com always points to the "closest" ghost server to the end-user.

Akamai has many more data points from which to deduce traffic flow information, but internap has higher-quality ones.

Of course the services you can get are different, but I wouldn't be surprised if Internap started offering services akin to what Akamai currently does..
-o

One big colocation site

All they really are is one big colocation site/ISP. They just happen to have line from all the major backbone providers. There service is great those heavy hits site that want to make sure the they get the best connection possible.

Re:Distribued servers instead of network connectio

http://www.akamai.com/ [akamai.com]

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:Not that revolutionary

I hate to burst your bubble, but no.

1). They create large private peering points which are in general overutilized and badly managed. Individual, private peers create just as much bandwidth without concetrating routes into a single facility, which also provides more redundancy.

2). Huh? The Tier 1 ISPs (which InterNap is _not_, the Tier 1 ISP which I am employed by does not consider InterNap a peer, but a customer.) all have meshed BGP backbones these days and diverse paths on their backbone trunks. Network redundancy is a simple matter of planning, and nothing revolutionary.

3). Actually, it's called peering. InterNap has to pay for half of these peers with other Tier 2 and smaller-scale Tier 1 carriers which consider them a peer, and they have to pay for bandwidth from the top ISPs who consider them a customer.

The ISP world is much, much different behind the scenes than it is in the ISP's marketing materials. They in NO way portray a truthful picture of the workings of the Internet backbone.

....and what would they be using Linux for? Routers? I sure hope not. Certainly not switches. How would the desktop machine they use in their Noc or as a statistics monitor affect their backbone performance in any way?

//Phizzy

Distribued servers instead of network connections

This is close to an idea I had. Place web caches/proxies close to major ISP in the network and serve content out of them instead. The Netscape and MSN homepages must be the most heavily hit pages, why not use local caches that update every 2 minutes co-located at major ISP's like Earthlink. More advanced caches could be used for dynamic content like eBay and the various stock services. The end result is faster response time (less traffic, and less distance traveled, but its not like anyone will notice the added 50ms), and a lower network load.

Re:Hard Problem?

I've seen work into resolving nP complete into polynomial time, but it is at the very basic stages. The best I've seen is, in worst case, cubic time, but it still can't be proven. (That, and most of the nP theory behind the cubic solution is heavily beyond my understanding.)

What you really have to look at is that while the computer is solving this shortest path, it is not loading the page. It has to find the path before it can even load the first graphic or bit of text. And while it is not loading that web page, the user is sitting there waiting. Maybe on a 1 GHz, it takes a lot less time then on my 'old' 166 MHz, but depending on how the nP algorithm is coded, you could still have a lot of time where the browser is just sitting there, apparently doing nothing (at least from the user standpoint).

And I think I can speak for a large chunk of the online populace when I say I find that waiting for a web page to load is one of the more boring things I can think of doing.

Kierthos

Re:What makes this different from a peering point

I took two tours with them awhile back and was explained the process...

They buy pipes from anyone with more than 1% of the global routing table on the net. They put all of these pipes in a PNAP in a location and they provide full redundancy on all of the links and equipment.

They pull in all of the routes, shoot them to a Linux box that massages the routing tables so that if a customer packet is destined for Alter.net, it will only travel down Alter.net's network, thus bypassing clogged peering edge routers. It doesn't rely on AS-PATH decisions at that point.

The edge peering routers are, traditionally, the most clogged/slow of the links on a providers network. Think about it, are you going to spend more money on your core routers that support YOUR network, or routers that pass global internet traffic to other networks? BBN planet was having these problems this week, in fact at some of their peering routers. It was all broken. :)

It is really quite an original idea. Very expensive to maintain all of the different links to all of the providers, but they only accept DS3 customers and higher, and you do get VERY good performance.

Not that revolutionary

This isn't that big a deal. If you read the article you'll find that all they're doing is laying connections between the busiest WWW sites.

It's not scanning or anything, just laying new fiber and forcing people to pay. Calling this new technology is like calling a toll road revolutionary.

The lost revenues caught my eye.

To me, this is the most interesting point in the whole article: "The money issue is important because to date, no company is turning a profit at providing backbone connections. And InterNap itself is still losing money -- the publicly traded company reported losses of $43.4 million on revenues of $22.5 million for the first six months of this year."

As the backbone providers ratchet rates up to alleviate this red ink, InterNap will start to make more money as demand rises for their colo service (since this means less traffic over the backbones), but I'm most curious how this sort of thing will play out when a business realizes that 90% of its customers are all on one node and why should they pay for backbone traffic at all if they can serve most of their customers without it?

Re:Not that revolutionary

You are 100% completely wrong, on all accounts:

1) They don't "lay connections" between web sites. They pay for peering with large BB providers.

2) They do some really funky stuff to BGP to make things more efficient and redundant. But it's a secret ;)

3) "Forcing people to pay"? Uhh, it's called selling something, and you study it in econ.

Why is it that every gee-whiz article these days has 50 people sign on immediately and say "whoopdeedoo"? I understand being a jaded technologist, but sometimes someone does something cool, and not EVERYONE on the planet knows about it. Don't dig it, don't read techie news sites...

They run mostly linux, too. Check their GPL policy.

uh, they've been doing this for about 3-4 years..

This is nothing new. InterNAP has been doing this for years now. Which is why they're so goddamn expensive. But I must say that they offer the *best* data pipes you can possibly get. They peer with 8-9 of the largest providers in each PNAP and your traffic goes to the provider that has the best route. They do an exhaustive systematic search through the global BGP routing table and pick and choose their routes individually. I would assume their route-maps are freaking gigantic. Their technology is unfortunately not real time... (yet. ;) Anyone who knows how BGP works can figure out how they do this.. it seems rather simple (I deal with them on a regular basis) but they came up with it first.

You mean, all it takes is shiny stuff?

I've got some tinfoil and a ten-watt smurf nightlight for you, and I'm prepared to undercut their offer. Is it a deal?