IRON vs. BGP (was Re: BGPttH. Neustar can do it, why can't we?)

Tue Aug 7 18:37:18 UTC 2012

On Aug 7, 2012, at 10:50 , Wes Felter <wmf at felter.org> wrote:

> On 8/6/12 8:04 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> 
>> The goal here was to make this as simple and cost-effective as the NAT-based
>> IPv4 solution currently in common use. There's no reason it can't be exactly that.
>> 
>> It does provide advantages over the NAT-based solution (sessions can survive
>> failover).
> 
> What do people think about Fred Templin's IRON multihomed tunneling approach (or LISP, I guess it can do it)? IRON should give you multihoming with stable IPv4 and IPv6 PA prefixes, even for incoming traffic. It's less reliable than BGP in theory since you'd be virtually single-homed to your IRON provider but that might be a worthwhile tradeoff since staying up is pretty much their purpose in life.
> 
> You'd have to pay a third provider to terminate your tunnels, but that might be cheaper than paying an extra BGP tax to both of your physical providers. IRON appears to require much less configuration than BGP and it can also provide IPv6 over v4-only providers (good luck finding *two* broadband providers in the same location that provide IPv6 and BGP).
> 
> -- 
> Wes Felter
> IBM Research - Austin
> 
> 
> 

I think IRON has some promise as well and might be interesting in some scenarios.

I think developing both is worth while. Different tools for different jobs.

Owen