Cisco NAT ISP – How to Combine Two ISP IP Addresses into One

ciscoispnat;

We have 2 ISP providers (X, Y) and we have connected the ISPs to a core switch>Sophos firewall>Switch rack>end user (LAN & WiFi). This ISP works on fail-over mechanism.

The issue here is that we work on live chat process where we answer customers' queries through Zendesk and other live chat apps. When an ISP is down, fail-over (Backup ISP) is taking 2 to 3 seconds to come up. In the meanwhile chats are getting disconnected. Due to this, we are losing customers. Can we use IP NAT to make two IP addresses into one IP address? Any ideas or suggestions will be helpful. Thanks.

Best Answer

This is a case where you need to get provider-independent addressing and peer with the multiple providers using BGP. You can then keep the same addressing when you fail over. It will still take a finite amount of time to fail over, but the addressing will remain the same, so the sessions should not disconnect.