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Thread Index [isp-caching] Re: CacheFlow caching engine Vs. Cisco Cache engine
Hi Illyse, I have tested the products (as well as Inktomi and Netapps) head to head on a few occasions for different ISP/Companies (KPN, KPNQwest, Alstom, etc). Not to be too blunt about it but the only people who choose the Cisco products are those who either: a) Fear for the financial future of the competitors. Or b) Have a full Cisco House and wish to take advantage of keeping all equipment under one vendor/support contract. Cisco are usually fairly behind in any new developments in streaming and caching and are not that responsive to the market needs. Having said that their solution is fairly reliable and is not a bad solution. If you want more features and faster response then I would choose Cacheflow. If you want the backing of Cisco, I would choose Cisco. Don't underestimate this either, many people were backing Inktomi a while back who by far had the better product (IMHO) and they went belly up after a few companies chose to use them. Check financial stats and sales figures with the company for future viability before buying from them. Important things to test are support for HTTPS and SSH too. It's also very handy to be able to have full access with both the CLI and GUI if you intend to install in remote sites. A lot depends on your intended usage. I have also tested WCCP, and Layer 4 switches from various vendors for use in the same solution and tested speeds of up to 8GB in total for major streaming solutions. I will append some cuttings from one of my last reports to a company (name withheld and any confidential information removed.) Please appreciate that I cannot give you any full test reports due to confidentiality and that some of this information may be out of date. I include it as advice only. If you need any help please let me know, I used to do this sort of selection full time so I am pretty well versed and totally independent of vendor in it :). I used to sell all brands and have support accounts with them all too. Please let me know in which manner you intend to use them too, reverse, transparent, L4, WCCP etc. Kind Regards, Ryan Gallagher. __________________________________________________________________ Out of the four products tested the Cisco box was quickly discounted due to lack of necessary functionality. Tests continued with the other three appliances in the lab which then built up to a live test. Cacheflow is the single product that had no major problems in the testing at all. It performed well and despite lacking a few minor functional requirements proved to be a very easy to use box with little to no intervention needed. Cacheflow showed bandwidth savings* of 21.2%. __________________________________________________________________ Overview The Cisco product proved weak in overall functionality and was dismissed early from the testing process. Abilities such as DNS caching and Quicktime support are very crucial to our deployment and were taken into account in our decision to dismiss the product from the final list. These along with other issues mentioned below add up to the final decision to remove this product from our caching selection. Functionality DNS, NNTP and Quicktime are not supported in Cisco caches at this time. There is also a lack of real time statistics available on the cache, which makes troubleshooting, and evaluation difficult. There is no on box solution for clustering and the only available option is WCCP which is available with all other products and is managed from a router and not the Cache box itself. Not all functionality is available via either the GUI or the CLI and it is often necessary to go from one to the other whilst configuring the same thing. This makes management difficult and non-intuitive requiring training at high level from all technicians. __________________________________________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: Illyse [mailto:illyse@...Sent: Friday, 18 July 2003 7:56 AM To: isp-caching@isp-caching.com Subject: [isp-caching] Re: CacheFlow caching engine Vs. Cisco Cache engine Adam, Were you running this in reverse proxy mode or forward/transparent? Also how much memory do you have on your CF boxes, do they have a 10/100/1000 port on them? Sorry to ask so many quesitons you have peaked my interest. Illyse -----Original Message----- From: Adam Denenberg [mailto:adam@...Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 11:19 PM To: isp-caching@isp-caching.com Cc: isp-caching@isp-caching.com Subject: [isp-caching] Re: CacheFlow caching engine Vs. Cisco Cache engine we have about 7 cacheflows deployed nationwide, but no Cisco gear. I can give you my $.02 on Cacheflow since we have had them for some time now. They are planning on releasing a major rev of their code , but who knows when that will actually get delivered. max simultaneous connections per cacheflow is 11,000. Not suer what cisco is but use this number as a guide. Also keep in mind that if you use a pair, and you do over 5500 connections sustained peak per cacheflow, and one dies, you are probably in trouble. performance is quite good. We push about 5000 connections during peak time and about 8 Mbit or so outbound and the cacheflow runs calmly at about 22% CPU. the limitation on these units are just pure connections. Configuration is pretty easy, not the greatest, but easy enough. Very Cisco like command line, but a few features are lacking, like to apply filter rules you need to copy the whole ruleset to a text editor, add your new rule, then paste it back in, instead of being able to add one rule. CF does however give you the ability to load configs from a central URL so if you have a central web server where you can store configs you can load each of the cacheflows that way instead of making the same change one at a time. You still have to "load" the new config on each box, but saves the cut and paste part. All the filters and forwarding definitions are all regular expressions so you can get pretty granular with them. that part is quite good. Reporting is virtually non-existent on these units. The only semi-reports are aggregated hourly , daily and monthly reports that dont offer anything too useful. I had to write a bunch of scripts to parse the logfiles to get useful data. hope this helps. adam On Sunday, July 13, 2003, at 05:50 AM, Mohd alomairy wrote: > Hello, > > We are a big company that want to implement a caching > solution for the Internet gateway to speed internet > browsing and host our own web portal and application, > current bandwidth is 5 Mbps and we will be scalling up > to 10Mbs by next 18 months. If you had the chance to > choose between CacheFlow (blue coat) and Cisco in > order to build a caching system solution for the > corporate Internet gateway, which vendor will you > pick, and why? > All Our networks are running cisco/Microsoft H/W & S/W > (no unix systems) > assume that you have no other choice. > > I'll highly appreciate any comments. > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! > http://sbc.yahoo.com > > > ____________ ___________ > ____________ ___________ ____________ ___________
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