Interconnecting DC across whole world, whats your practice ?

[from88]

Hello,

We have 4 Physical Data Centers in different continents, they're interconnected using IPSEC tunnels with BGP. Everysite site have 2-3 different ISP's and as we all know internet is a messy place where every minute is some action is happening. Sometimes when connectivity gets laggy we can disable one tunnel so all traffic goes through another one which happens to go through another ISP and sometimes it saves the connectivity. We have implemented some home-made script which pings every tunnel and if some loss is detected that tunnel is disabled. Personnaly I dont like home-made tools.
1) Maybe you've some practice in that ? Is there any commercial tool for DCI connection verification ?
2) Also, in our organization developers, software guys are living in a different world than network engineers - when building a product they're not aware of network, they develop soft without keeping in mind that connection could be laggy and with timeouts. Maybe you've some practise how to explain to developers team - what's the internet and that internet is never converged ?:) Thank you:)

[Joseph W. Doherty]

As to a "product" that can deal with monitoring and responding to WAN performance, you might investigate Cisco's PfR technology, www.cisco.com/go.pfr.

Years ago, Microsoft published a whitepaper, for developers, explaining WAN network issues that should be considered when building network based applications. Unsure it's still available, but you might search for it (or something like it). Besides presenting such documentation to your developers, you might also have them consider building their network based applications with a network impairment tool in-line (i.e. one that can simulate latency and/or packet loss).

[from88]

thank you, i will check PFR.

is there any chance to get more concrete keywords about Microsoft whitepapers for developers about WAN network issues ? I didn't find any papers about it..

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Sorry, no. When I posted earlier, I did a quick search, but didn't find the document. Again, this was something published years ago (although information in that document would still be germane). Assuming the paper is still on-line (somewhere), it likely will require some keyword trial-and-error to find it.