Best way to supply colo customer with specific provider

Keith keith at pando.com
Thu Feb 1 16:25:57 UTC 2007


Just curious, the customer wants to purchase cogent bandwidth through 
you instead of going directly?

Wouldn't it be easier just to have Cogent run another connection to the 
Meet Me Room in your facility and just extend it to their cage or rack?

This seems like a lot of over engineering to me to provide a customer 
with Cogent bandwidth.

Andrew Gristina wrote:
> another way is tunnel them to a border router that
> interfaces with Cogent and deal with it at the border
> router.  QinQ tunnel, GRE, IPSec, or whatever tunnel
> type you can support and will service the type of
> traffic your customer needs (L2 or L3).  If you have
> multiple Cogent connections you might even be able to
> DMVPN to the relevant points.  MPLS is another elegant
> way to handle it, but if you have MPLS infrastructure,
> you probably would have said so.
>
>
> --- Steve Gibbard <scg at gibbard.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> 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
>>>       
>
>
>
>  
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