[AusNOG] What Transit Providers Would You Pair Together

[James Braunegg]

Absolutely that's only going to tell you routing differences.... But I believe this is a very important part of research to work out how diverse the new provider is from your current provider from a BGP point of view at least....

You could also ask the short list of providers what routing equipment do they use, where is it located, how many physical devices in each location, do they run local pop sites or local and international pops, what other features can they provider ie do they support BGP communities if so what can you do, do they have DDoS mitigation capabilities if so what can they do, do they support both copper and fibre cross connects and is there any price difference. (Some smaller networks don't have fibre capabilities... although you can always use a media convertor..)

Gartner recommend during contract negotiations to ask for audited financials to check the stability of the company if the company is relatively new. Of course a lot of the above would be provided under a NDA.

Kindest Regards

James Braunegg
P:  1300 769 972  |  M:  0488 997 207 |  D:  (03) 9751 7616
E:   james.braunegg at micron21.com<mailto:james.braunegg at micron21.com>  |  ABN:  12 109 977 666
W:  www.micron21.com/ip-transit<http://www.micron21.com/ip-transit>    T: @micron21


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From: Brent Paddon [mailto:brent.paddon at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 10:00 AM
To: James Braunegg
Cc: James Mcintosh; ausnog at ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] What Transit Providers Would You Pair Together

This is all well and good, but is nothing more than a snapshot-in-time view.

Commercial relationships and routing preferences/decisions change...

Brent

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 8:51 AM, James Braunegg <james.braunegg at micron21.com<mailto:james.braunegg at micron21.com>> wrote:

Dear James



I always start my research on http://bgp.he.net/  looking up each potential AS and then compare the common peers and make a list of few IP addresses which they are advertising (ie Prefixes)



Once I have fined tuned a few providers I use http://www.lookinglass.org/  and pick a handful of looking glasses locally and from around the world.



ie local peering looking glasses and local transit providers in each state followed by looking glasses from a handful of each part of the world.



I would then suggest doing a trace route from each looking glass (around the world)  to different IP's within that providers prefix list from each potential  AS and compare the inbound trace towards that network between different IP ranges and different providers and your current provider. The above should give you a good idea of inbound paths, and how diverse or common they are. Finally once you have narrowed down your search I would then ask the provider for an outbound trace to certain networks. Without bound traffic this is slightly different again depending if your taking full routes / partial or a default route, you might let BGP do its thing, or you might create route maps for each provider or use software to optimize outbound routes.



Hope this helps



Kindest Regards

James Braunegg
P:  1300 769 972  |  M:  0488 997 207 |  D:  (03) 9751 7616
E:   james.braunegg at micron21.com<mailto:james.braunegg at micron21.com>  |  ABN:  12 109 977 666<tel:12%20109%20977%20666>
W:  www.micron21.com/ip-transit<http://www.micron21.com/ip-transit>    T: @micron21


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This message is intended for the addressee named above. It may contain privileged or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this message you must not use, copy, distribute or disclose it to anyone other than the addressee. If you have received this message in error please return the message to the sender by replying to it and then delete the message from your computer.



-----Original Message-----
From: AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net<mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net>] On Behalf Of James Mcintosh
Sent: Friday, November 01, 2013 7:20 AM
To: ausnog at ausnog.net<mailto:ausnog at ausnog.net>
Subject: [AusNOG] What Transit Providers Would You Pair Together



Hi Noggers,



We're looking at adding a second transit provider for redundancy (and hopefully more-or-less even load balancing). I was wondering what transit providers people would recommend pairing together to get the most diverse set of routes. Obviously you don't want your two upstreams to have very similar routes and paths.



As a start I was thinking perhaps a Gang of Four provider plus a non-Go4 provider would make a good pairing but I'd really appreciate the comments of some of the more experienced BGP gurus on the list.





-James

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