There are scenarios that we see from time to time in the data center / colocation world. We see advertised claims that most people accept for face value. This article goes over two examples of this and gives some information on how to research these claims.
a) “We have 25 different backbone connections at our data center”
b) “We use state of the art BGP routing at our data center”
Let me start with IP addressing. Mac Mini Vault is operated by CyberLynk Network. If you look at any of our IP’s you will see that we own 20 IPv4 C-blocks registered with ARIN. We actually have another set of IPv4 blocks and a /32 net block for IPv6 that will be rolled out in the near future. This is important because as long as you are with any CyberLynk service you will not have to change your IP address. We do not lease or rent IP addresses from an ISP and resell them to you.
Your colocated Mac mini is configured with its very own IP address. The internet is made up of routers which attempt to find the shortest path between your computer’s IP and the destination IP. Most data centers will use multiple internet connections for redundancy. In order for that redundancy to be effective, BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing is used to move traffic headed towards an offline connection to one of the other connections which is online. For the sake of redundancy, once you get to a handful of peers the chances of having any downtime is extremely low.
We constantly monitor our network utilization and we currently have three gigabit connections to the internet using BGP routing. We have the capability to scale bandwidth and add connections easily.
You can search the IP address of cyberlynk.net (66.185.30.2) on bgp.he.net (BGP Toolkit). You’ll find our AS number is AS21554, which is associated with our corporate name. If you click on the AS number you will see a graph of information. To see the connections our IP blocks are peered with click the “Peers v4” tab. The “Whois” tab shows our AS registration.
You can also search on bgp.he.net by the domain name and it will display the DNS results. Under the A Records you can click in the IP addresses to look up their associated AS number.
When shopping for colocation this is a simple way to research if a company is claiming to own their own data center but really sub leasing out space, if they are really BGP routed or not, and how many networks they are actually peered with.