Redundant Internet Access?

Supp0rtLinux asks: "In order to meet uptime requirements and SLAs, we decided to get redundant T1's with BGP. We already had two Cisco 7200 routers and a T1. After the ISP turned up the additional circuit and we tested everything on our end, all seemed fine. But when the CO lost power and the generator failed, we had no access for 16+ hours. This prompted some investigations which revealed that yes, we did in fact have a redundant T1 with BGP setup and local redundant routers with separate UPS... on our side. However, on their side both our feeds were plugged into the *same* switch which was on the same PDU which happened to be in the same CO and was on the same sonet. And they were charging us for redundancy! Six month later, we have a truly redundant BGP setup. Each feed goes to separate CO's with the primary to the local one. This makes for separate physical switches, separate power, and we have confirmed we're on physically separate sonets. Now, the only true single point of failure is the physical cabling in the street, but in CA that doesn't get damaged very often. To those of you on Slashdot who know what I'm talking about: are your circuits truly redundant? What have your experiences in network redundancy been? How have you gotten past the sales guy to a tech that knows what redundancy really means? Have you been able to prove your redundancy? Have you found yourself paying for something that you weren't really getting?"

Comments

Re:Not there yet

[Asgard]

Beware, I recall a story about how redundant lines were leased from two different companies, only to find that they both leased their lines from the same company and it was all contained in the same conduit .

Very concerned

[invisik]

I worked at a place that was running redundant T1's just as you describe. They might as well have had all the wires running together the whole way.

My issues from there:

1. How do you convince an ISP to bring a feed in from another CO? Distance is a huge problem--they don't want to run it.

2. How do you know what the ISP has on their end, UPS's, generators, etc? Should that be part of the SLA? Or should you demand a tour of their facilities to see where your wire goes?

3. How can you coordinate two seperate ISP's for automatic redundancy? I suppose with a LinkProof box or something. And how do you know they aren't coming through the same telco CO?

4. Should you pay to have them manage the lines and router configurations in a 24/7 scenario? Or does it work well enough to have them do the initial install and then let it run?

5. Finally, what's a resonable cost for this redundancy?

I have some more projects that will be requiring this type of setup. Am interested to hear any opinions and recomendations from experience from fellow slashdotters......

Thanks much!

-m

TowerStream

[shadowxtc]

If you live in any of the following areas...

# Chicago, IL
# New York, NY # Greater Boston, MA
# Greater Providence, RI # Newport, RI
# Westerly, RI

TowerStream may be something to look into. I use them as our primary connection at the office - they are far cheaper than a traditional T1 ($350/mo for 512k, $500 for 1.5mbit, they can handle around 5GBit max I believe).

True line-of-site is not required, a reflected signal is usually sufficient. An external flat-panel antenna about 6 inches tall and wide is required, however. With ours setup on the roof, we get 0% packet loss, and have had no problems through heavy snow, rain or thunderstorms.

I have occasionally had connection issues, where the wireless modem has needed to be power-cycled. I suspect, however, this is simply due to it overheating :).