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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Enterprise Multihoming
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, John Neiberger wrote: > On another list we've been having multihoming discussions again and I > wanted to get some fresh opinions from you. > > For the past few years it has been fairly common for non-ISPs to > multihome to different providers for additional redundancy in case a > single provider has problems. I know this is frowned upon now, > especially since it helped increase the number of autonomous systems and > routing table prefixes beyond what was really necessary. It seems to me > that a large number of companies that did this could just have well > ordered multiple, geographically separate links to the same provider. > > What is the prevailing wisdom now? At what point do you feel that it is > justified for a non-ISP to multihome to multiple providers? I ask > because we have three links: two from Sprint and one from Global > Crossing. I'm considering dropping the GC circuit and adding another > geographically-diverse connection to Sprint, and then removing BGP from > our routers. > > I see a few upsides to this, but are there any real downsides? Many/most of my external connectivity problems are provider-related rather than circuit-related. Having two circuits to a single provider doesn't help when that provider is broken. I'm not saying that multi-ISP BGP-based multi-homing is risk-free, but I don't see multi-circuit single-provider as a viable alternative. ________________________________________________________________________ Jay Ford, Network Engineering Group, Information Technology Services University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 email: [email protected], phone: 319-335-5555, fax: 319-335-2951
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