Pingdom Joins ISPs As A Local Internet Registry

Pingdom, the website uptime and monitoring company, has just become a Local Internet Registry (LIR), meaning it has been assigned a block of IP addresses. They join 468 other registries in Sweden, of which the largest are Internet Service Providers, academic institutions, and other enterprises that assign most of its block of IP addresses to its customers. Becoming a LIR fits into Pingdom’s plans of updating and replacing all of its infrastructure in 2012.

Pingdom explains the benefits of becoming a LIR:

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.