My institution has a single /16 spread across 2 sites: the lower /17 is used at site A, the upper /17 at site B. Sites A & B are connected internally. Currently both sites have their own ISPs and only advertise their own /17's. For redundancy we proposed that each site advertise both their own /17 and the whole /16, so that an ISP failure at either site would trigger traffic from both /17s to reconverge towards the unaffected location.
There are two different ways to achieve almost-identical results. However, one is a 50% more "green" than the other, i.e. friendly to other network operators. These two choices are functionally equivalent, and possible, only because things currently work for both your /17's. Here are the two ways to do this: One is: - announce /17 "A" and /16 from uplink ISP-A - announce /17 "B" and /16 from uplink ISP-B - This results in 3 prefixes globally: A, B, and /16. The other is: - announce /17 "A" and /17 "B", with different policies (i.e. prepend your AS once or twice), at *both* ISPs. - This results in 2 prefixes globally: A and B. In all cases, as long as one ISP link is up, there is a path to both A and B. In most cases, the best path to A or B, is *mostly*, but not completely, under your influence. So, the main difference to everyone else is, the presence or absence of a routing slot (/16), and/or extra copies of A and/or B. The routing slot occupies a slot in data-forwarding-plane hardware that is very limited. The extra copies of A and B (and extra copies of your AS in the AS-path) only eat cheap control-plane memory. If everyone did things nicely, we would not have as much of a crisis on the hardware side as we (collectively) do. Please consider being part of the solution (announcing only /17's, but in both places) rather than part of the problem (adding a new redundant /16 to everyone's routers, including in the hardware slots.) Brian