Radware Peerdirector (posted 2002-03-30)

It seems more and more products that try to optimize BGP are reaching the market. One is the Radware Peerdirector. There is a whitepaper (PDF) about how the Peerdirector works on the site. This product monitors bandwidth use and reconfigures routers to change prefix advertisements to different peers to optimize how the available bandwidth is used.

Of course, such a product doesn't do anything a network manager can't do manually. However, periodically changing information in BGP introduces instabilities into the global routing system, which is undesirable at a minimum, and may even pose real harm under certain conditions.