Saving Money With Tiered AccessSaving Money With Tiered Access

As I.T. executives make their networks more secure, one important step is multihoming, subscribing to several Internet service providers and sending balanced traffic loads to each. The challenge is knowing which provider to use when.

Sockeye Networks Inc. this week will unveil a version of its Global Route product to help solve the problem. The 3.0 release has two key features: software that analyzes and acts on various ISP billing plans and a suite of reports aimed at CIOs.

Global Route assesses line conditions for each provider and sends traffic down the most-efficient path. In previous releases, customers had to calculate the effects of each ISP's billing plans and manually enter thresholds to tell Global Route where to send the traffic to get the best prices and performance. Now that process is automated. IT managers enter terms, such as the billing plan's number of tiers, whether the pricing is fixed or usage-based, and whether traffic can burst above the access speeds.

Digital West Networks Inc., a Web-hosting and co-location provider, has used Global Route to manage access lines from four providers since September. "It has been able to keep us in certain bandwidth tiers without affecting performance," says chief technology officer Josh Richards.

What's more, the tool has improved overall performance of Digital West's Internet access. Performance with Global Route doubled from what it was when Richards relied on Border Gateway Protocol to route traffic. He's able to validate that with reports that also come with the 3.0 release, which show current and historical performance data on all the ISPs, a valuable tool when renegotiating ISP contracts. The reports show metrics such as which ISPs have the most performance problems and outages or which require the most rerouting.

Unlike competitors RouteScience Technologies Inc. and netVmg Inc., Sockeye doesn't sell the product but rather charges about $4,000 per month per location. The 3.0 upgrade is free to existing customers.