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RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices

  • From: Karyn Ulriksen
  • Date: Mon Jul 10 20:59:48 2000

The CS800 chassis is a pretty big box, about the size of a Cisco 7507.  Last
I checked it had 4x RAM capability of the CS100 (and 2x of the CS150).
Since the major source of my woes appeared to be memory related, it didn't
look like a good jump $-wise and u-wise (I'm guessing at 16u ?) to serve the
same number of devices.  As I remember, it's a 10 slot chassis - two for the
management modules.  How many slots do you have populated on your chassis?
Are they all GigE or 10/100s or a mix?  

Karyn

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Noetzelman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 5:40 PM
To: Karyn Ulriksen
Subject: RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices


Never saw any problems like that, but the key there is that you were running
on a -100 and not an -800 ... the arrowpoint guys were very candid with me
that there were some issues with the -100 ... but since the -100 is far too
small for the amount of data I push, I didn't even consider it.

Incidentally, the articles Larry was referring to can be found at:

http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/17/1318233.shtml
and
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/18/1427203.shtml

J

---
Jeremy Noetzelman
Director of Network Operations
PeopleLink

-----Original Message-----
From: Karyn Ulriksen [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 5:37 PM
To: 'Jeremy Noetzelman'
Cc: '[email protected]'; '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices


What version of code were you running on those Arrowpoints?  I'm starting to
wonder if I didn't just get fed some bad hardware.  I ran one of the leading
software publisher's  FTP servers on our CS100 and it got real ugly.  I had
the techs and engineers at Arrowpoint go over the configuration from top to
bottom.  It would hit around 250 connections, crash, and reboot.  It
wouldn't reactivate the service until after we did a cold reboot.  Did you
ever see anything like that?  The issue persisted from their Version 2 code
thru Version 3.

Karyn

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Noetzelman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 5:22 PM
To: Karyn Ulriksen
Subject: RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices


See inline responses


---
Jeremy Noetzelman
Director of Network Operations
PeopleLink

-----Original Message-----
From: Karyn Ulriksen [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 5:12 PM
To: 'Jeremy Noetzelman'
Cc: '[email protected]'; '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices


I keep getting these vague responses.  But, I _really_ interested in what
was done with them.

I hate to ask this level of detail (and I'm not some marketing wig), but I
_really_ want to know.  Could you answer the following questions?

How come you wouldn't consider the Cisco, Alteon or F5?


----

I've used Alteon before.  Never again.  A chore to configure, and atrocious
performance in a live environment.

F5 has a solid product, but I dislike the architecture they have for a high
volume site.  It's certainly something worth considering for a lower volume
site that doesn't mind having a PC do the load balancing, but I prefer
something ASIC based.

Cisco provides similar performance to the F5 in tests I ran a while back,
and
is a cross between a PC and a switch ... I don't like the architecture, and
the
price you pay for the Cisco logo is a little steep too.

----

What tests did you run?

----
Initially we ran basic stress testing, followed by more in depth stress
testing
using custom built tools running on 20 Linux boxes.

Once those were passed, we did the ultimate test and ran them in the
production
network for a short time.

----

Which services did you configure and how many rule sets?
----
We loadbalance everything from web and ftp to email, dns, instant messaging,
persistant chat connections, and some other internal stuff that we do.

I don't recall the exact number of rulesets, but we have about 30 virtual
servers and about 150 real servers being load balanced.

----


Did you run a moderately high volume of FTP service across it (say 500
simultaneous over 2 servers)?
----

Our FTP services run on 3 boxes and we get about 300 simul with no problems.

Testing the arrowpoint boxes, we were able to easily get 3000 simultaneous
FTP connections across 3 servers.


Hope this helps

J



-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Noetzelman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 5:04 PM
To: Karyn Ulriksen
Subject: RE: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices


I'm in the process of switching from Foundry to Arrowpoint.

I wouldn't even consider Cisco, or Alteon, or F5.

Foundry and Arrowpoint both make an excellent product, it came
down to the GS-800 fitting my needs more precisely.  I eval'd them
both over a period of a couple months (and I had originally been using
ServerIrons)  .... decided to make the switch based on performance
and scalability that the SI just can't match up to right now.

J


---
Jeremy Noetzelman
Director of Network Operations
PeopleLink

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
Karyn Ulriksen
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 4:54 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Cc: '[email protected]'
Subject: Arrowpoint Load Balancing Devices



I'm wondering how other ISPs are using Arrowpoint devices in their networks.
They must be successfully implemented in some networks with out many
gotchas, considering that Cisco bought them.  After six months of testing
Arrowpoint, I ended going with another LB solutions.  But I can't help but
wonder what others are doing with them.  Have they made enough changes in
their product that I should take a look at them again?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Best regards,

Karyn Ulriksen
Director of Network Operations
PublicHost, A SiteStream Company
22 Mauchly, Suite 200
Irvine, California  92618  USA
Phone: (949) 743-2000
email: [email protected]
URL:  http://www.publichost.com