North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Enterprise Multihoming
>>> "Stephen J. Wilcox" <[email protected]> 3/12/04 9:06:38 AM >>> >I dont agree that connecting to two+ upstreams makes you better. In my >experience end networks have a couple of orders of magnitude more downtime than >a PoP in any reasonably large ISP. Ie the percentage theoretical improvement is >small. > >In addition you seriously increase the complexity of your system, chances are >you're using the cheapest kit you could find (or at least cheaper and smaller >than what I would use).. its not great at BGP and may fall over when you get a >minor DoS attack, you probably generate flaps quite a bit from adhoc changes and >if you're announcing a /24 then thats going to get you dampened quickly.. so you >actually create a new weakest link. Also most of the corporates I've dealt with >take defaults rather than full tables.. so if the provider does have an issue >you still forward the traffic, theres no failover of outbound routing. > >Even if you spend (waste) the money on some decent gear, you're on your own and >when a problem occurs the ISPs are going to be less helpful to you (not by >choice, I mean they dont have control of your network any more.. there knowledge >of whats causing problems is limited to the bit that they provide to you), so >chances are your problems may be more serious and take longer to diagnose and >fix. The above arguments are rather similar to the ones I heard on the other discussion list I mentioned, and they were somewhat compelling. > >IMHO avoid multihoming. You will know when you are big enough and you *need* to >do it, if you're not sure or you only want to do it cause you heard everyone >else is and its real cool then I suggest you dont. In our case, we already are multihoming and I'm considering moving away from that to a simpler solution. It's been my assertion that we didn't need to multihome in the beginning. The decision was made at a level higher than me. However, now that we have it I'm trying to determine the pros and cons related to moving to a single provider. Thanks, John --
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