Best way to supply colo customer with specific provider
Hello all, Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first... We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection. So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way to do this, and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this. The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive". Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, "grace". Any other suggestions? Thanks, Rick Kunkel
We had that same problem and ended up doing it exactly as below, with limited BGP announcements and policy routing all over. The customer also demanded high-bandwidth at low cost, without regard to how good the actual bandwidth was. It was, as you say, graceless. Luckily we convinced them to purchase standard multi-carrier transit. I hope you can do the same :) Cheers, Randal Kohutek
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way to do this, and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this.
The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive".
Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, "grace".
Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel
If you actually want to do this, you've got four choices: - Policy route, as mentioned below. - Get the customer their own connection to Cogent. - Have a border router that only talks to Cogent and doesn't receive full routes from your core, and connect the customer directly to that. - Do something involving route servers and switches outside your border routers, a-la-Equinix Direct. The policy routing idea will work, for some definition of work. I forget whether Cisco now has a fast (non-processor-switched) path for policy routed traffic; they didn't yet when somebody convinced me to try this many years ago. If nothing else, it will make a mess of configuration and troubleshooting. Getting the customer their own Cogent connection is likely the least trouble, but may not save you as much on the bandwidth cost as aggregating the customer's traffic into the rest of your traffic would. Connecting the customer to a Cogent-only border router works fine if you already have such a border router. If not, it may require significant reengineering. The route server suggestion is thrown out mainly as a conceptual exercise. It would require a lot of design work. All that said, if you're paying your engineers and operations people developed world salaries, and paying major well-connected city bandwidth rates, none of these suggestions should make your accountants or your customer's accountants happy. You'll be saving a bit on bandwidth costs while putting in large amounts of engineering time that at best will do nothing useful for your other customers. Any way you do this, you'll probably find that it costs you considerably more than it would to give the customer your standard product. -Steve On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Rick Kunkel wrote:
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
So now of course we're attempting to figure out the best way to do this, and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this.
The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive".
Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, "grace".
Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel
Steve Gibbard wrote:
If you actually want to do this, you've got four choices:
- Policy route, as mentioned below. - Get the customer their own connection to Cogent. - Have a border router that only talks to Cogent and doesn't receive full routes from your core, and connect the customer directly to that. - Do something involving route servers and switches outside your border routers, a-la-Equinix Direct.
What about an MPLS VPN?
another way is tunnel them to a border router that interfaces with Cogent and deal with it at the border router. QinQ tunnel, GRE, IPSec, or whatever tunnel type you can support and will service the type of traffic your customer needs (L2 or L3). If you have multiple Cogent connections you might even be able to DMVPN to the relevant points. MPLS is another elegant way to handle it, but if you have MPLS infrastructure, you probably would have said so. --- Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org> wrote:
If you actually want to do this, you've got four choices:
- Policy route, as mentioned below. - Get the customer their own connection to Cogent. - Have a border router that only talks to Cogent and doesn't receive full routes from your core, and connect the customer directly to that. - Do something involving route servers and switches outside your border routers, a-la-Equinix Direct.
The policy routing idea will work, for some definition of work. I forget whether Cisco now has a fast (non-processor-switched) path for policy routed traffic; they didn't yet when somebody convinced me to try this many years ago. If nothing else, it will make a mess of configuration and troubleshooting.
Getting the customer their own Cogent connection is likely the least trouble, but may not save you as much on the bandwidth cost as aggregating the customer's traffic into the rest of your traffic would.
Connecting the customer to a Cogent-only border router works fine if you already have such a border router. If not, it may require significant reengineering.
The route server suggestion is thrown out mainly as a conceptual exercise. It would require a lot of design work.
All that said, if you're paying your engineers and operations people developed world salaries, and paying major well-connected city bandwidth rates, none of these suggestions should make your accountants or your customer's accountants happy. You'll be saving a bit on bandwidth costs while putting in large amounts of engineering time that at best will do nothing useful for your other customers. Any way you do this, you'll probably find that it costs you considerably more than it would to give the customer your standard product.
-Steve
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Rick Kunkel wrote:
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business,
of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
So now of course we're attempting to figure out
we run into a fair number the best way to do this,
and I figured that rather than reinventing the wheel, I'd check to see how others accomplish things like this.
The way I can imagine doing it is by using route-maps to steer all of this customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and modifying our BGP announcements by AS prepending on whatever block or blocks we set aside to be "Cogent-exclusive".
Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain amount of, for lack of a better word, "grace".
Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel
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Just curious, the customer wants to purchase cogent bandwidth through you instead of going directly? Wouldn't it be easier just to have Cogent run another connection to the Meet Me Room in your facility and just extend it to their cage or rack? This seems like a lot of over engineering to me to provide a customer with Cogent bandwidth. Andrew Gristina wrote:
another way is tunnel them to a border router that interfaces with Cogent and deal with it at the border router. QinQ tunnel, GRE, IPSec, or whatever tunnel type you can support and will service the type of traffic your customer needs (L2 or L3). If you have multiple Cogent connections you might even be able to DMVPN to the relevant points. MPLS is another elegant way to handle it, but if you have MPLS infrastructure, you probably would have said so.
--- Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org> wrote:
If you actually want to do this, you've got four choices:
- Policy route, as mentioned below. - Get the customer their own connection to Cogent. - Have a border router that only talks to Cogent and doesn't receive full routes from your core, and connect the customer directly to that. - Do something involving route servers and switches outside your border routers, a-la-Equinix Direct.
The policy routing idea will work, for some definition of work. I forget whether Cisco now has a fast (non-processor-switched) path for policy routed traffic; they didn't yet when somebody convinced me to try this many years ago. If nothing else, it will make a mess of configuration and troubleshooting.
Getting the customer their own Cogent connection is likely the least trouble, but may not save you as much on the bandwidth cost as aggregating the customer's traffic into the rest of your traffic would.
Connecting the customer to a Cogent-only border router works fine if you already have such a border router. If not, it may require significant reengineering.
The route server suggestion is thrown out mainly as a conceptual exercise. It would require a lot of design work.
All that said, if you're paying your engineers and operations people developed world salaries, and paying major well-connected city bandwidth rates, none of these suggestions should make your accountants or your customer's accountants happy. You'll be saving a bit on bandwidth costs while putting in large amounts of engineering time that at best will do nothing useful for your other customers. Any way you do this, you'll probably find that it costs you considerably more than it would to give the customer your standard product.
-Steve
On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Rick Kunkel wrote:
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business,
we run into a fair number
of issues that we've never run into before. Got a
new one today, and
although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish
what he wants, I'd
rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting
bandwidth exclusively
through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at
less expensive pricing.
The money people here are up for it, but
obviously, they want to make sure
that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
So now of course we're attempting to figure out
the best way to do this,
and I figured that rather than reinventing the
wheel, I'd check to see how
others accomplish things like this.
The way I can imagine doing it is by using
route-maps to steer all of this
customer's traffic out the Cogent pipe, and
modifying our BGP
announcements by AS prepending on whatever block
or blocks we set aside to
be "Cogent-exclusive".
Again though, this seems to me to lack a certain
amount of, for lack of a
better word, "grace".
Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel
____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss an email again! Yahoo! Toolbar alerts you the instant new Mail arrives. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/
Rick Kunkel wrote:
Hello all,
Being relatively new to the colocation business, we run into a fair number of issues that we've never run into before. Got a new one today, and although I can think of kludgey ways to accomplish what he wants, I'd rather get some other ideas first...
We just had our first customer that's requesting bandwidth exclusively through a particular provider of ours (Cogent) at less expensive pricing. The money people here are up for it, but obviously, they want to make sure that he's confined to that Cogent connection.
Unless your customer is paying more for the privilege, your money people are probably making a very big mistake here. What happens when all your customers decide they want to only buy the cheaper bandwidth from you?
participants (7)
-
Andrew Gristina -
Joe Maimon -
Keith -
matthew zeier -
Randal Kohutek -
Rick Kunkel -
Steve Gibbard