My personal feeling is that the provision of service should be
implemented on a separate port of the ISP's router - this provides
both the ISP and the web farmer with a measurable point of demarcation
My personal feeling is that any Unix machines should be provisioned
on separate IP space from the routers. And that perhaps a default-
monitoring program (which we run ourselves anyway) might be run to
make sure that the machines aren't defaulting to anyone if the machines
are hooked up to the same switched fabric as the routers (which I think
is a bad idea).
I'm not arguing that getting transit via an XP fabric is a bad idea -
as long as the XP provider gets beefy enough switching and as long as
the transit providers have enough ports into their routers from the
XP fabric, it's a fine idea - much better than lots of rack-rack cables.
But boxes w/ hard drives are a different story IMO.
independent of the IX. If the web farmer paid for an Ethernet or
whatever interface, they'd get an Ethernet or whatever interface, and
the bandwidth available to the customer on that port would not vary
with other traffic as it would if the web farmer were competing with
the ISP's peers for an interface attached to the GIGAswitch. Should
the web farmer purchase connectivity from other ISPs, their purchases
can be implemented as cross-connects to ISP routers (assuming the
address space can be advertised, the topology of the web farmer's
network can handle it, etc., etc., etc.).ISPs might also wish to implement certain peering relationships with
cross-connects rather than consume bandwidth on their interface to the
GIGAswitch. To us, cross-connects are cross-connects, whether they
connect ISPs to web farmers or ISPs to ISPs.Stephen
Avi