A data center's network is as critical as its power and cooling — and yet it is the layer most often overlooked when evaluating colocation facilities. A facility with a single internet provider is a single point of failure for your network connectivity. If that provider has an outage, your servers are running but unreachable. To the outside world — and to your users — the effect is identical to a server failure. Multihome connectivity eliminates that single point of failure.
What Multihome Means
Multihome refers to a network configuration with two or more independent internet service provider connections. In a multihome setup, your colocated equipment is reachable through multiple ISPs at the same time. Under normal operation, traffic routes across available providers based on BGP routing policy. If one provider's circuit fails, BGP automatically reroutes traffic through the remaining providers — without any manual intervention and without any configuration change on your side.
How BGP Routing Works
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the routing protocol that governs how traffic moves across the internet. At the data center level, BGP lets Infinity Data Center announce the IP addresses assigned to your equipment across multiple ISP connections simultaneously. Each ISP knows those addresses are reachable through it. Under normal conditions, BGP selects the optimal path based on routing policy. When a provider goes offline, BGP detects the failure and withdraws the routes through the failed provider, leaving only working paths active.
This process is automatic and happens at the network layer — no action is required from your team or from Infinity Data Center's operations staff.
Carrier Diversity at IDC
Infinity Data Center's network uses multiple independent upstream carriers to keep connectivity up through maintenance events, fiber cuts, and backbone issues. If any one carrier has a network incident, routing maintenance, or a fiber cut affecting its path to the facility, the others continue to carry your traffic.
The data center's location in Knoxville provides access to multiple carrier fiber routes in the East Tennessee region. When you need a dedicated circuit from a specific carrier, we use our carrier partnerships to negotiate the rate and term on your behalf, and bring-your-own-carrier cross-connects are available. Contact Infinity Data Center to discuss additional carrier connectivity options.
Automatic Failover in Practice
From the perspective of a client with colocated equipment on a multihome connection, ISP failover is largely invisible. Traffic continues flowing. Applications remain reachable. If you are monitoring your network and have alert thresholds configured, you may see a brief BGP reconvergence event in your logs. From an application or end-user perspective, the failover is generally imperceptible for TCP-based applications and causes a brief interruption for UDP-based real-time traffic.
This automatic failover behavior is what makes multihome fundamentally different from having a single high-availability ISP connection. With a single provider, any failure in that provider's path takes your connectivity down until the provider resolves it. With multihome BGP, the failure of one provider path has no operational impact as long as at least one other path is available.
Combining Multihome with Point-to-Point
Multihome internet connectivity and point-to-point connections work together as complementary services. Multihome provides redundant public internet access for your colocated equipment. Point-to-point provides a private, dedicated fiber link between your office location and the data center. Combining both gives your office private connectivity to the data center (via point-to-point) and your colocated equipment redundant public internet access (via multihome) — a network architecture with no single points of failure in either the office-to-datacenter path or the datacenter-to-internet path.
Who Needs Multihome?
- Organizations with business-critical applications that must remain internet-accessible — any single-ISP outage causes a real business impact
- Service providers hosting infrastructure that serves customers — downtime has direct customer impact and potential SLA consequences
- Organizations with latency-sensitive applications where manual failover (calling the ISP, waiting for restoration) is not an acceptable response procedure
- Any business that has experienced an ISP outage affecting colocated equipment and cannot afford a repeat
See Multihome Internet Connections at Infinity Data Center for service details. Contact Infinity Data Center or call 866.790.4678 to discuss multihome connectivity options and pricing for your colocation deployment.