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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Faster 'Net growth rate raises fears about routers
"Eric A. Hall" wrote: > > > You say "responsible cab drivers must have not one, but two taxicabs, > > in order to provide service in the event of a failure. Therefore, I > > bought one from Fisher-Price, and one from Hot Wheels, and I'm > > astounded to find that neither provides me with the luxury which I > > expected." I think Patrik may have been suggesting that if you had > > a Checker, you might not need to worry quite so much about redundancy. > > ...and then a meteor lands on the checker... > > Better variant of the analogy would be "we lease checkers from a fleet > provider, so if one goes out we have access to more." > > Short-term the best hope for this is for businesses to put their boxes in > colo farms or at an ISP with multi-homed networks in place. The problems > start when customers try to multi-home from their HQ facility or from > somewhere else that's isolated. > > Convincing customers that it is cheaper/better to put their main servers > somewhere off-site away from them is the challenge. Otherwise more of them > would do it. OK. So now you have a business with their servers in a colo, all nice and protected. Now they need their offices multihomed, so that when UUNet's cloud falls over, or some DSL provider goes under, they still have the ability for the humans in their offices to get out to the Internet. Let's be clear here: Servers are NOT the only critical item. Companies have REAL needs for their employees to be able to access the Internet. A redundant solution to that access can and often is mission critical. What do you suggest for this case? There are a few options: 1. Use a multi-port NAT box to do the multi-homing. Advantages: avoids all interactions with ISPs over the multi-homing issue. Disadvantages: it's NAT (see many other documents if you need an explanation for the limitations). 2. Find a way to get a /24 or larger so that employees have real IP addresses, and then fight to get that multihomed to multiple SEPARATE Internet Providers. 3. Buy a private circuit to your colo (assuming it's close enough to make this possible), and pay the exhorbitant bandwidth fees to your colo as a failover solution. 4. Set up a modem on a NAT box and call it your Internet connectivity for 6 to 8 weeks after your upstream ISP goes away. Run and hide so that you don't have to hear the screams from employees and management. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Senie [email protected] Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com
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