Thanks to everyone who has responded so far. I'm glad that I got some
opinions here before I proceeded. I also participate in another list
that has some fairly experienced people on it. They prevailing opinion
there was that multihoming to multiple providers was overrated and
largely unnecessary, and they just about had me convinced.
My current opinion is that since we can't accept much downtime in the
case of a single provider failure, it's probably not wise to put all of
our eggs in Sprint's basket even if all circuits are geographically
diverse.
Thanks again,
John
John Neiberger wrote:
Thanks to everyone who has responded so far. I'm glad that I got some
opinions here before I proceeded. I also participate in another list
that has some fairly experienced people on it. They prevailing opinion
there was that multihoming to multiple providers was overrated and
largely unnecessary, and they just about had me convinced.
My current opinion is that since we can't accept much downtime in the
case of a single provider failure, it's probably not wise to put all of
our eggs in Sprint's basket even if all circuits are geographically
diverse.
This decision should be a business decision.
Business decisions are made for a number of reasons. There is no
message in the order I list the ones that come quickly to mind, I
personally think some of them are faulty, but all are real.
Engineered designs.
Political needs.
Personal prejudices.
Posturing.
Appearances.
I personally favor the engineering approach, which if properly done
will account for the meaningful parts of the others. A recent
employer had a very low cost plan that had for practical purposes
unlimited capacity available which were required to throttle to
reduce commodity Internet expenses. New management decided multi-
homing was necessary at relatively huge expense for reasons that
must have made sense to somebody.
Hello;
Thanks to everyone who has responded so far. I'm glad that I got some
opinions here before I proceeded. I also participate in another list
that has some fairly experienced people on it. They prevailing opinion
there was that multihoming to multiple providers was overrated and
largely unnecessary, and they just about had me convinced.
Let me guess - they are with big providers ?
I keep track of new ASN's appearing in BGP - of the last few thousand or so, the number that do not appear to be small multi-homers is about 1 in 500. (The metric is, no transit prefixes and only 1 or 2 small prefixes announced in BGP.)
That does not prove they are correct, but a lot of people
clearly are of this opinion.
My current opinion is that since we can't accept much downtime in the
case of a single provider failure, it's probably not wise to put all of
our eggs in Sprint's basket even if all circuits are geographically
diverse.
Thanks again,
John
--
Regards
Marshall Eubanks
T.M. Eubanks
e-mail : marshall.eubanks@telesuite.com
http://www.telesuite.com
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:10:17 -0700
From: John Neiberger
My current opinion is that since we can't accept much
downtime in the case of a single provider failure, it's
probably not wise to put all of our eggs in Sprint's basket
even if all circuits are geographically diverse.
Use multiple border routers. Keep your IGP lean and nimble.
Think about BGP/IGP synchronization.
WAN links can fail, but so can ethernet links and entire routers.
Eddy