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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Enterprise Multihoming
>>> Daniel Roesen <[email protected]> 3/11/04 9:13:04 AM >>> > >On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 09:04:57AM -0700, John Neiberger wrote: >> 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. > >Who defines what is "really necessary"? What is your understanding >of "really necessary" when it comes to the desire to be commercially >and technically independent of your suppliers? > >It's this discussion again. That goes off in entirely the wrong direction but I guess I'll clarify that statement. :-) My point was that most companies could have met their connectivity requirements by simply getting multiple connections to the same provider from the beginning. However, among the less-technical managers it seemed to be popular to demand connectivity to multiple ISPs. It seems that me that this was not really necessary from a technical perspective in many cases, it just made people feel good. I don't really want to focus on that, though; I'm more interested in the situation as it stands today. If a company were going to add brand new Internet connectivity where it didn't exist before, what factors would you use to determine if multiple ISPs should even be considered? Given the stability of the larger ISPs and the general lack of true BGP expertise at many companies, is the potential benefit of multihoming to different ISPs worth the added risk and responsbility that comes with using BGP? Our BGP configuration isn't very difficult to understand but we do have a lack of BGP knowledge in the department and some additional training is in order. However, might it not be better to just simplify our connectivity and remove BGP altogether? Sure, I like BGP as much as the next guy but there's no sense in running it just because we can. :-) Thanks, John --
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