Since we are all here at this point I would like to ask some questions on what should be done for the small companies. I have setup several /24’s with various ISP’s and have gotten them multi-homed with secondary ISP’s, setup BGP and overall things work relatively well. Now I have always been able to go to some of the route servers and looking glass sites and see my annoucements making it to several providers. But I have no way of knowing that every ISP is accepting these routes and I have always beleived that they weren’t anyway.
Now through all this many people have asked the same question I am asking. Companies that are being responsible and only occuping a single class C still need redundancy and to me this is what BGP was meant to do. What does the nanog community in general think should be done to help this growing group of customers ? I never remember reading a FAQ anywhere that said only large networks should get the redundancy features that have been built into the Net.
And to answer the other point many of my customers would not mind paying a fee to make their routes known. I would rather pay for proper routing then pay for a /19 and waste space.
Derrick
The pressure is on to use co-location service only from Big Players. Indeed, remember the big fight
over Exodus peering arrangements? Someone (GTE?) decided that Exodus should pay them for transit
and pulled peering. since no other large network pulled such stunt the result was that GTE customers
were inconvenienced more than Exodus customers.
The message is loud and clear. If you want your server farm to have good access, put it in a good collocation
facility run by a very large provider who has good redundancy not only of their network as a whole but
of their colo facility (a co-lo facility with only one WAN circuit does not have good redundancy
even if the LAN is exceedingly good and fault-tolerant etc.).
Dana
Co-location is fine in some cases, but in certain business cases and
personally, I think in-house is a much more preferable solution. With my
current company, we host shopping carts for many merchants. If we go
down, they go down. So we require 100% uptime.
We do this with multiple providers. This could also be done by
co-location, since most co-lo facilities have multiple providers as well.
But consider the extreme of that facility being swallowed up by the Earth.
Then you're out of luck. A lot less extreme cases can happen too. An
entire co-lo facility can be shut down by any number of problems. Also,
it can make hardware maintanence more difficult.
Our current network infrastructure spans two physically separate sites,
multiple providers, with multiple servers backing each other up. If one
site goes up in flames, that won't keep us from business as usual.
My problem is that it took us a while to get to this position. We had to
build up a client list until we had taken up the 8 class C's ARIN
requires. It would have been nice to be multi-homed from the beginning
and simply use an upstream provider's addresses, but the ISPs I've dealt
with are very anal about having their addresses advertised to another ISP.
So the redundancy was something we could only get after we had evolved.
I feel that if your business case requires redundancy, it should be
available, and not restricted by things like ARIN's bookkeeping
requirements.