I regularly have to disucuss multihoming with enterprises in my role. Generally they are all after HA for their precious and valuable web-servers, and would like to connect to two or often three upstreams for resiliency. Then comes the supplementary problems of how do I balance the traffic ? Going to APNIC usually proves fruitless for these guys, then it's down to the SP's who are often less than co-operative. I agree Service Providers often had different motives for multihoming, being price with a side-effect of resiliency, and even at Waikato we'd buy off more than one provider and shift traffic around depending on the "special of the week". Personally, I think both can be false economies, causing less efficient bandwidth utilisation, and less reliable links for many users, trying to iron out routing problems, resiliency decisions, global filtering and dampening of long prefixes.
From the New Zealand enterprise perspective I still think a connection to one primary ISP using their Super-nets for aggregration, following Best Practices and designing deployments to support renumbering is the best place to start. It is then often enough to have a second link to a well connected ISP for NZ domestic, or even direct APE/WIX connectivity as many NZ sites don't need huge global 24/7 availability.
Just my opinion, Arron -----Original Message----- From: owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz]On Behalf Of Peter Mott Sent: Monday, 3 December 2001 10:07 AM To: Simon Lyall; nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: RE: Article on Slashdot, quick comments
What strikes me as slightly odd is that most people who say they want to multihome for "fault tolerance/redundancy purposes" will reveal to you, under intense questioning, that what they *actually* want to do is load balancing.
Is load balancing really ever the ultimate objective, or is it merely a requirement of the multihoming architecture?
Our primary objective with a change to multihoming was to force our existing carrier to meet the price for International bandwidth being offered by another. Asking them to bring the price down did not work. You have to be multihomed and be sending service orders to reduce bandwidth to get their attention. Having said that, we have enjoyed the fault tolerance benefit twice since making the transition. Peter Mott Chief Enthusiast 2DAY INTERNET LIMITED It's kind of fun to do the impossible - Walt Disney -/- - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog