On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Miguel de Leon Dimayuga wrote:
Collapsing AS'es has its technical benefits, ultimately resulting in financial benefits. For starters, you'll be able to manage your transit traffic better (and thus grow your pipes in a more sane manner).
I'm also looking at it from the perspective of making peering with various providers or in various exchanges a more compelling business driver, as opposed to putting all of the $$ into transit.
You'll also be able to control your inter-AS traffic much better (especially if you plan to eventually collapse and use common servers/services across AS'es). An example of this is collapsing your news server farms or mail server farms.
Most of the service/server consolidation has already been done.
One approach we took before merging AS'es is to make sure you have a common local pref and community infrastructure among the AS'es you want to merge. attempting to go confeds with mismatching local pref and community based policies might be a headache.
I designed both for all of the other ASes so they're all similar in design.
On the IGP front, make sure that your private networks are distinct among AS'es. Once you merge OSPF entities, you could have duplicate 192.168.x.x spaces.
My big concern is controlling IGP growth as a whole. Each of the ASes is running their own independent OSPF implementation. Dealing with all of those disjoint backbone areas and rolling them into one AS while minimizing/eliminating service disruptions for my customers has been a source of constant brow-beating.
That's a start. my 0.02 cents worth.
Much appreciated. jms