Flow Control Platform (FCP)

Flow Control Platform™ (FCP) is an alternative to our Performance IP route optimization service, designed for businesses that have already established their own multi-homed network architectures.

Pump Up Your Network Power

FCP includes route control hardware and software that helps your network function similarly to our P-NAP® (Private Network Access Point), monitoring the global Internet and dynamically adjusting your network and performance. FCP’s user-set thresholds help to:

  • Optimize network traffic to ensure the specified performance of business-critical applications
  • Save money by opting for less expensive routes for lower priority traffic
  • Free up resources that are required for manual monitoring and routing

Using traffic metrics, FCP allows you to make informed network routing decisions that can impact everything from customer satisfaction to your provider relationships.

“For any sufficiently large network, I’m convinced that operating an Internap FCP should pay for itself in less than six months. Having an FCP on a network like ours is like having a license to print money. That’s rarely something an operations person can say.

Dave Kochbeck
Director of Technology, Friendster

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How Flow Control Platform Works

Most networks rely on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to determine how to route data. BGP uses a single criterion – number of hops – to choose a path. BGP-based networking has no insight into the business value of the data you’re sending. By acting as an end-to-end load balancing solution, FCP lets you avoid up-to-the-minute variations of BGP. The FCP solution allows you to simultaneously balance the need for low-cost delivery of standard information and optimized routing for your premium business transmissions, like e-commerce or rich media.

FCP’s power comes from its ability to:

  • Passively analyze IP network-bound traffic in real-time
  • Identify which networks your applications send traffic by measuring round-trip times and bandwidth usage
  • Employ patent-pending algorithms to optimize all traffic for cost and performance at the same time

FCP Benefits

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. That’s why FCP is so valuable. And it goes beyond mere traffic analysis by delivering meaningful metrics and reports that you can use to understand your current state, plus the ability to implement real-time changes based on that knowledge.

Our clients report up to a 50% improvement in network performance after implementing FCP, thanks to its ability to:

  • Automatically route traffic around network outages
  • Identify and select the top performing path at any given time
  • Avoid network issues such as brownouts and slowdowns – factors that are responsible for 80% of the events impacting revenue and productivity

FCP service also offers other valuable business benefits by:

  • Enabling cost-effective routing for less business-critical applications
  • Supplying data that allow proactive cost management of provider relationships, even enabling renegotiation of service level agreements
  • Decreasing support call volume and helping employees resolve issues faster
  • Boosting customer satisfaction and expansion opportunities through the ability to offer performance metrics and internal Service Level Agreements (SLA)
  • Freeing up network engineers to focus on revenue-building activities

Flexible Solutions

Our FCP solution is offered in a range of models with unique performance, data storage, availability, interface and growth requirements so that we can serve all kinds of multi-homed enterprises.

  • Model FCP-10Gx: For larger enterprises and content providers with significant bandwidth usage and growth projections
  • Model FCP-10G: For networks with stable bandwidth growth projections
  • Model FCP 5200: For larger enterprises and content providers with significant bandwidth usage and growth projections at single-digit gigabyte capacity
  • Model FCP 500: For networks with stable bandwidth growth projections or large enterprises with limited data flow
  • Model FCP 120 & FCP 60: Two options designed for smaller locations that require complete cost and performance optimization along with Internet visibility capability
  • Model FCR 85: Ideal for multi-homed locations that run multiple sites that require remote traffic collection with central location management

A Commitment to Maintenance

FCP customers receive a comprehensive maintenance plan that covers new software releases, installation of patches and bug fixes, and protection against the possibility of hardware failures with rapid replacement or repair of any defective FCP hardware, and 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC) support. Our robust customer portal provides instructions, technical briefs, release notes, and more. We give you all the tools you need to begin optimizing your network performance and saving money right away.