North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Best way to supply colo customer with specific provider

  • From: Steve Gibbard
  • Date: Tue Jan 30 23:42:30 2007

If you actually want to do this, you've got four choices:

- Policy route, as mentioned below.
- Get the customer their own connection to Cogent.
- Have a border router that only talks to Cogent and doesn't receive full
  routes from your core, and connect the customer directly to that.
- Do something involving route servers and switches outside your border
  routers, a-la-Equinix Direct.

The policy routing idea will work, for some definition of work. I forget whether Cisco now has a fast (non-processor-switched) path for policy routed traffic; they didn't yet when somebody convinced me to try this many years ago. If nothing else, it will make a mess of configuration and troubleshooting.

Getting the customer their own Cogent connection is likely the least trouble, but may not save you as much on the bandwidth cost as aggregating the customer's traffic into the rest of your traffic would.

Connecting the customer to a Cogent-only border router works fine if you already have such a border router. If not, it may require significant reengineering.

The route server suggestion is thrown out mainly as a conceptual exercise. It would require a lot of design work.

All that said, if you're paying your engineers and operations people developed world salaries, and paying major well-connected city bandwidth rates, none of these suggestions should make your accountants or your customer's accountants happy. You'll be saving a bit on bandwidth costs while putting in large amounts of engineering time that at best will do nothing useful for your other customers. Any way you do this, you'll probably find that it costs you considerably more than it would to give the customer your standard product.

-Steve

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Rick Kunkel wrote:


Hello all,

Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number
of issues that we've never run into before.  Got a new one today, and
although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd
rather get some other ideas first...

We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively
through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing.
The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure
that he's confined to that Cogent connection.

So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way to do this,
and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how
others accomplish things like this.

The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this
customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP
announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to
be "Cogent-exclusive".

Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a
better word, "grace".

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Rick Kunkel