2007 was a busy year for us, full of significant technological advancements, most of which have been executed without much fanfare. We’re always looking for ways to improve the speed, reliability, and value of the services we provide, so I welcome you to the Profitability.net Tech Blog, where hopefully we can shed some light on the technology driving our services. I’ll be using this space to provide you with a behind-the-scenes look at our datacenter operations, as well as in-depth technical detail on new products as well as improvements and upgrades we make to our existing infrastructure. I also look forward to analyzing current news and trends in the datacenter sector to help identify technology that can help your business, as well as pitfalls to avoid.

We already have a full slate of exciting new product offerings and improvements to our existing services on the schedule for 2008, but before we get into that I’d like to take a step back and highlight one of the most significant additions made in 2007. On October 31 we switched our Internap Flow Control Platform from “watch” mode into active production. The Flow Control Platform is a route optimization appliance that helps to ensure that traffic leaving the datacenter always takes the quickest, most reliable path to its destination.

Why is such an appliance necessary? Let’s take a brief look at how Internet routing works. The essential building block of modern internetworking is the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. BGP is how a router decides which of many paths to choose to send traffic down. The way BGP makes routing decision is actually fairly simple. Every Internet provider has a “nickname” used on the Internet to represent their organization. These nicknames are assigned by ARIN and are called Autonomous System Numbers, or ASN’s. As an example, Profitability.net’s ASN is 30504 and represents every device on our network. BGP enables routers to share amongst themselves which networks they have access to and the number of ASN’s that must be traversed in order to reach those networks. When it comes time to compare routes, BGP just looks at the number of ASN’s that must be traversed in order to reach a particular network and chooses the path that crosses the fewest ASN’s.

Most Internet traffic is routed using exactly that procedure. The problem, however, is BGP fails to take a few factors into account. First, BGP is built entirely on trust. If a neighbor router claims to be able to reach a network, it must be believed even if that claim turns out not to be true. This can lead to sending traffic down a path on which it cannot reach its destination. Secondly, BGP is not able to consider relative performance of the paths it has available. Just because one route may have fewer ASN hops than another does not necessarily mean it is the shortest or quickest path. This is where the Flow Control Platform comes in. The Flow Control Platform watches all traffic flows in and out of our network tracking the routes taken as well as measuring latency and packet-loss. It then takes the top 10,000 destination networks and checks the latency and packet-loss to those networks via every path available to it and compares the results. Armed with those results, it looks for networks for which BGP is choosing a sub-optimal path and corrects the decision, causing the traffic to take the better path. This means that we are able to detect routing problems or congestion in other providers’ networks and route around them, all before you would ever notice there was a problem.

So what does all that mean for you and your customers? It means that we will always be delivering your traffic on the fastest path available — which means your web pages will load more quickly, downloads will complete in less time, and your data will available to an even higher percentage of Internet users at all time. We believe we are the first provider in Ohio to implement such technology and are very proud to announce its addition to our network.

–Andrew Cruse