Traffic Shaping for Internet & MPLS

[prashanma]

Do Cisco have separate hardware appliance for traffic shaping & bandwidth control ?

[Francesco Molino]

Hi

It's hard to answer that question without getting more input.
What do you want to achieve?

Basically, on router getting the internet and mpls connection, you can apply policy-map to shape or police the traffic and it also support usually nbar2 to classify traffic based on protocol or application.

[prashanma]

I want to avoid Internet & MPLS links from getting saturated and slowing down during peak times. 

For in order to achieve that we want have separate hardware appliance, do we have separate cisco hardware appliance ? or any vendor has that kind of hardware appliance ?

[Francesco Molino]

Ok. For this there's no dedicated appliances. For other vendors (i don't know all of them), it's the same.

For that purpose, you can setup policy-maps and determine what traffic is the most important that needs to be forwarded in case of congestion.

If you're using your internet link as backup for mpls (vpn) you can also implement iwan solution, determine all important traffic and it will dynamically forward this traffic out to the less congested link.

But again, no dedicated hardware for this. You can do everything with your Cisco router if you have one

[Joseph W. Doherty]

"I want to avoid Internet & MPLS links from getting saturated and slowing down during peak times. "

Depending on the Cisco device, that might be possible without the need for another hardware appliance. Additionally, "slowing down", alone, often effectively creates saturation effects before there's actual network saturation. QoS can often manage saturation.

"For in order to achieve that we want have separate hardware appliance, do we have separate cisco hardware appliance ?"

Again, you might not need a separate hardware appliance.

"or any vendor has that kind of hardware appliance ?"

Yes, there are a couple of vendors that have such products. (E.g. https://archive.icann.org/en/tlds/org/applications/unity/appendices/pdfs/packeteer/PSDS.pdf) However, once again, much can be done on many Cisco devices negating the need for such hardware appliances.

If you have control on both ends of a path, like for a MPLS link, you rarely need a 3rd party hardware appliance. If you only have control of one end of a link, like for Internet, than a 3rd party hardware appliance can do things unavailable on Cisco devices.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

For just the purpose of traffic shaping and/or bandwidth control? None that I know of. Many Cisco devices, often support some kind of bandwidth control.