Many of the NJEDge.Net's members were procuring multiple broadband services from ISPs for business continuity reasons. But due to the challenges of balancing network traffic between ISPs using BGP, members of the consortium were often buying more bandwidth than they needed.
"They couldn't use the second link that they brought up; they had an 80:20 balance of traffic," says Jim Stankiewicz, director of Internet engineering for NJEDge.Net. "They were struggling with it."
NJEDge.Net implemented LISP to move applications, network resources or devices between network providers without having them lose connectivity. LISP enabled users to remain connected even when workloads were balanced between their ISPs.
NJEDge.Net is also assessing LISP to address disaster recovery needs. LISP provides the ability for customers to move data center resources, such as virtual machines, between data centers while maintaining connectivity.
"[Members] want applications or servers to run in another location without making DNS changes, without making any routing changes," Stankiewicz says. "Our initial testing has proven that we can move a Web service application around without making those changes."
LISP is implemented the same way some installations of network virtualization are: with a separate and centralized policy and control database that maps the static endpoint ID to its fluid location. Network virtualization and its software-defined networking underpinnings usually separate and centralize a switch/router control plane from the forwarding plane of those switches and routers.
But in the case of LISP, users don't program the routers or switches; they program the mapping database.
Vinci Consulting's use of LISP enabled it to host lisp.cisco.com in its New York data center without global server load balancing or DNS name changes. Using LISP endpoint identifiers, Vinci was able to move individual host IP addresses from servers in San Jose to some B-series servers in its Cisco UCS farm in New York.
Vinci provides its own mapping and proxy infrastructure for its LISP customers, but the addresses for lisp.cisco.com are registered to the LISP beta network and use a separate infrastructure. Vinci used the same equipment to simultaneously support its own addresses and address infrastructure, and the lisp.cisco.com addresses in a separate infrastructure.
