[68410] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Enterprise Multihoming
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr.)
Thu Mar 11 12:28:16 2004
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 11:24:51 -0600
From: "Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr." <LarrySheldon@cox.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <s0503b29.043@efirstbank.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
John Neiberger wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who has responded so far. I'm glad that I got some
> opinions here before I proceeded. I also participate in another list
> that has some fairly experienced people on it. They prevailing opinion
> there was that multihoming to multiple providers was overrated and
> largely unnecessary, and they just about had me convinced.
>
> My current opinion is that since we can't accept much downtime in the
> case of a single provider failure, it's probably not wise to put all of
> our eggs in Sprint's basket even if all circuits are geographically
> diverse.
This decision should be a business decision.
Business decisions are made for a number of reasons. There is no
message in the order I list the ones that come quickly to mind, I
personally think some of them are faulty, but all are real.
Engineered designs.
Political needs.
Personal prejudices.
Posturing.
Appearances.
I personally favor the engineering approach, which if properly done
will account for the meaningful parts of the others. A recent
employer had a very low cost plan that had for practical purposes
unlimited capacity available which were required to throttle to
reduce commodity Internet expenses. New management decided multi-
homing was necessary at relatively huge expense for reasons that
must have made sense to somebody.
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