Enterprise Multihoming

Thu Mar 11 17:24:51 UTC 2004

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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