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

Tue Aug 7 17:50:48 UTC 2012

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