Monday, March 31, 2008

ICTS vs users

For some reason there is an article praising UCT ICTS's War on Terror...er...Bandwidth:
[snip lots]
ICTS has implemented Packeteer Packetshaper
[snip lots more]
AFAIK this actually happened ages ago. So there's no real reason to trot this out now unless people are griping that GEN3 isn't doing much for them.

And there's no mention of what will happen once:
  • UCT transitions to SANReN and has a 10 Gbps link to the local node, and
  • TENET moves to the 10 Gbps overseas pipe due mid-2009
I don't see the Packeteer appliance scaling to multi-Gbps speeds without serious extra $$$ invested. And would it be worth doing so?

Consider this paper on web search clickstreams http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1177080.1177110]:
The MWN [Munich Scientific Network] provides a 10Gbit/s singly-homed Internet connection to roughly 50,000 hosts at two major universities along with additional institutes; link utilization is typically only around 200–500 Mbit/s in each direction.
Now this might have been back in 2006; it doesn't really matter if the traffic demand has doubled since then. Also, since major local and international peering will then be in effect, actual transit pressure should decrease.

C'mon ICTS - plan ahead now!