In the middle of 2017 We decided it was time to look at our options for WAN connectivity as our current 3 year contract was ending in January. We began by meeting with Shamrock Consulting to discuss our needs and determine our requirements.
After numerous emails back and forth after the meeting our requirements landed as follows:
- Redundant connectivity out of our Facility
- 5 Gbps Internet Access
- Ability to establish a Direct Connection to AWS for an upcoming cloud hosted product launch.
In the end three solutions were proposed and we began evaluating the pros and cons of each.
Option 1:
- 1Gbps Direct Internet Access to our Facility through Carrier 1
- 10Gbps Fiber Wave to Coresite LAX1
- 5 Gbps DIA carried over this via MegaPort through Carrier 2
- Direct Connect to AWS via MegaPort
Option 2:
- 2 Diverse dark fiber links to Coresite LAX1 & Equinix LAX1 providing 10 Gbps to each location
- 5 Gbps DIA carried over this via PacketFabric through Carrier 1 at CoreSite
- 1 Gbps DIA carried over this via PacketFabric through Carrier 2 at Equinix
- Direct Connect to AWS via PacketFabric
Option 3:
- 2 Diverse dark fiber links to Coresite LAX1 & Equinix LAX1 providing 10 Gbps to each location
- 5 Gbps DIA carried over this via PacketFabric through GTT at CoreSite
- Direct Connect to AWS via PacketFabric
From a redundancy vs complexity perspective we quickly ruled out Option 1. We then ruled out Option 2 because of Cost & Complexity in managing two ISP’s and obtaining our own /24 IP block that we could advertise to both ISP’s. This left us with Option 3 and we decided to move forward with it.
Fast forward now to January and we’re in the final stage of implementation. It’s been a hectic week with several change requests in order to establish the redundancy we required but it’s now ready to go live. We’ve established redundant routes with GTT and are using BGP to advertise our assigned /26 across both. We’ve also stepped it up a notch and have implemented Layer 3 routing internally as well in order to segregate different areas of the business.
Here’s what we’ve ended up with:
All of this is accomplished with the following hardware:
- 2x Industry Leading firewalls
- 2x HP 10G distribution switches for distributing WAN connectivity to both firewalls
- 2x HP 10G distribution switches for the LAN core.