Pingdom is one of the world’s fastest growing uptime and monitoring companies, measured by number of customers. In our ongoing effort to make the web faster and more reliable, we work proactively to improve our operations.
One such improvement is to register and become a LIR or Local Internet Registry, something pretty special. In fact, there are only 469 Local Internet Registries offering service in Sweden, where we at Pingdom operate from.
Let us explain what this means and how it will help us provide an even better service to our customers.
Benefits of being a LIR
Although there are many benefits for Pingdom to be a LIR, here are the most important ones:
- Our systems can now talk to a number of other Internet Service Providers using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). If, for example, one ISP our system is connected to experiences some problems, we can automatically and transparently route our traffic through another one. This is called multihoming, and it makes our already redundant systems even more fault tolerant.
- In a similar way, we can use the same IP addresses in a number of locations using anycast. This means that with multiple data centers, traffic always goes to the nearest data center. So, in the unlikely event of one data center becoming unavailable, because of fire, power outage, or other reason, another data center can immediately and transparently take over, using the same IP addresses.
- As a LIR, we also get control over a certain number of blocks of IP addresses. That means that we have our own IP addresses, and for those addresses, Pingdom appears as the Internet Service Provider. In practice, this gives us the ability to move networking equipment around more efficiently and without any effect on operations.
Pingdom continues to expand
Becoming a LIR, and putting the necessary hardware, software, and network equipment in place to support it, is just one step for Pingdom in the ongoing process of upgrading our infrastructure.
In fact, during 2012 we will continue our work from 2011, to replace all our existing infrastructure. We’re excited about the year ahead and the opportunities that being a LIR offers us.
Picture via Shutterstock.
