At 09:20 PM 7/23/97 -0400, John J. Buxbaum wrote:

Bruce, I have several customer who are multi-homed, some of which are ISP"s but not all. I am seeing this a coming trend for customers who wish to have redundant internet access. A bit pricey i bet, but maybe easier on the nerves :)

Here in the Bay Area, the BBN outage of last fall, among other outages, has really shaken up the established Silicon Valley companies. A lot of network managers had a lot of explaining to do and many of them said "I recommended a backup connection, but it wasn't in the budget." Now it's in the budget. Every major corporate site will multi-home if they haven't already, or else move their servers into an ISP POP. I do not in any way mean to cast aspersions on BBN/BARRNET. I used to work at BBN before it bought BARRNET. I also was Exec Dir of CERFNET, a BARRNET competitor in soCal. It is the fact that a 24 hour outage could happen to the premium Bay Area ISP that was the shocker. If it can happen to BBN/BARRNET, in the view of corporate network managers and their executive managements, then it can happen to anyone and there is no way that a major site can afford to rely on just one ISP. It's too bad it was BBN, but it would have happened eventually to UUNET or MCI or Sprint. Multihoming is here to stay in the Bay Area. --Kent Kent W. England VP of Technology GeoNet Communications, Inc. Direct: 415.596.6321 555 Twin Dolphin Drive Fax: 415.596.1701 Redwood City, CA 94065 Company: 415.596.1700 http://www.geo.net Email: kwe@geo.net