Q&A: Boost Your Multi-Homed Network for Optimal Availability and Performance

Last week, we held our webcast on how to boost the availability and performance of your multi-homed networks using Internap’s Flow Control Platform™ (FCP) intelligent route optimization appliance. As such, we wanted to share the Q&A here.

As a reminder, the FCP sits in your multi-homed network environment and performs three essential functions:

• Monitors your networks to identify network issues
• Automatically performs routing changes to route your traffic across the most optimal path to your end-user
• Provides extensive network reporting and simulation functions for a full view into your multi-homed network environments

Questions & Answers (Q&A) from the Webcast

“Does the FCP sit in-line to the network and if so, does this represent a Single Point of Failure (SPOF)?”

FCP does not sit in line of your network traffic. Your traffic flows through the same chain of equipment as it did previously. There is no Single Point of Failure risk to your network.

“What performance improvements have your customers experienced through implementation of FCP?”

Internap has a very broad set of customers using FCP – Financial, Online Trading, Online Retail, Gaming, etc. The feedback we get is that companies see up to a 40% improvement in performance through the reduction of latency they were previously experiencing.

“How does the routing change downstream traffic?”

FCP’s traffic routing is done at the point of egress. FCP looks at end-to-end traffic performance to your destination and the quality of this link to make a determination as to the best carrier and path to route your traffic.

“Does the FCP optimize incoming traffic?”

No. The FCP optimizes your outgoing traffic across the network.

“Do you offer a class of service for different providers?”

FCP does have configuration options that allow companies to route traffic across their chosen carriers based on performance or cost or a combination of the two characteristics [FCP provides the ability to configure policies in its FlowView Manager panel].

Our Performance IP™ service allows customers to leverage our Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ technology to route their traffic across a broader set of carriers that Internap connects to via our Private Network Access Point (P-NAP®)architecture.

“How much capacity can FCP handle?”

Flow Control Platform is a scalable solution. FCP comes in two configurations, the FCP-GigE and FCP-10GigE. The FCP-GigE can support up to four GigE connections and 4Gbps. The FCP-10GigE can support up to two 10GigE connections and up to 20Gbps.

With their companion Flow Control Remote (FCR) devices, the FCR-GigE and FCR-10GigE, the solutions scale in increments up to 4Gbps and 20Gbps, respectively, for each additional FCR unit deployed.

“Can you use FCP with your Performance IP connection?”

Absolutely. You can optimize FCP within an existing Performance IP connection. This is the best of both worlds in that customers can leverage the greater diversity of carriers for traffic routing that Internap is connected to. This is not a requirement for using FCP.