Peer-to-Peer

Upgrading network for improving efficiency

Through the deployment of Cisco solution, Irevna has been able to address the issues related to the availability of Internet, mail service, and VPN tunnels, writes Nivedan Prakash

Irevna is the high-end financial research and analytics outsourcing division of Crisil, one of India’s leading ratings, research, and risk and policy advisory company. The company’s clients include financial institutions with investment banking operations, insurance companies, asset management firms and the corporate sector.

For clients, spread across the globe, Irevna is an ideal knowledge partner in cutting-edge financial analytics and thought leadership. The company’s domain expertise, rapid execution, and quality output helps it maintain deep and engaging relationships with clients.

Business challenges

Irevna is a technology-savvy enterprise and uses sophisticated IT solutions. But to help meet its clients’ distinct business needs, it required high Internet availability. The company has offices and delivery centers at multiple locations where Internet connection is provided by different Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

However, this made it difficult to ensure high Internet and mail server availability as well as VPN tunnels uptime. In fact, Irevna already had a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-based network architecture that used a Cisco solution to ensure high Internet availability. Nonetheless, it wanted to enable Performance Routing (PfR) across locations and this involved routing Internet traffic along the best performing ISP link across locations.

To address these issues, Irevna went ahead with the Cisco solution because of Internet performance routing, scalability and growth path with respect to latest technology ahead of curve and better service delivery, high availability of VPN, and load balancing of multiple ISPs that are geographically distributed across the country.

Commenting further, Natarajan Kumarasamy, Head-IT Infrastructure, Crisil Group, said, “Cisco’s ability to deliver a complete solution fabric, encompassing the data center, corporate LAN, intranet and network edge that addressed highly available, flexible, secure and scalable solution for network infrastructure was the key driver for Irevna choosing it. The partner’s ability to design and integrate this was also an important criterion.”

Although other vendors were also evaluated for this solution, Cisco’s ability to deliver and complete PfR solution on top of BGP for all Internet based solutions across different geography locations encouraged the company to choose its solution.

Phases of implementation

The implementation of the Cisco solution took place in two phases. Phase I included BGP implementation across different geographies and Phase II involved deployment of PfR over Irevna BGP Cloud.

As far as Phase I is concerned, high availability of Internet was one of the core requirements for Irevna as a business need. Even though different locations of Irevna used different ISPs, there were issues in addressing the availability of Internet, mail service and VPN tunnels.

Considering the business needs, Cisco came up with the BGP-based WAN architecture, which met Irevna’s requirements. This involved using Metro Ethernet links to form a ring which connects the WAN edge of all locations. Steps to tackle the Internet redundancy were implemented in such a way that it addresses ISP, hardware, and media failures.

An enhanced object tracking mechanism was also used with Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) functionality to address the issues associated with the Ethernet-based termination from ISP. Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) was then used as an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) in the WAN edge across locations, and fully meshed iBGP architecture was adopted across all Internet routers. The Cisco 2800 series routers were used for this architecture.

“Currently Irevna is in a comfortable position to handle the Internet-availability-related business needs by achieving the automatic ISP failover across multiple locations, as well as within a particular location,” commented Kumarasamy.

For Phase II, though the company had BGP-based network architecture that uses Cisco solution to address the Internet availability, it wanted to enable performance-based routing PfR across all locations ISP and routing the Internet traffic along the currently best-performing ISP links across locations. Cisco recommended its best-breed PfR technology to meet the above requirement.

“PfR architecture is well planned by Cisco Implementation Partner by keeping Irevna BGP network architecture in mind. Irevna-Cisco WAN components have been upgraded as per the Cisco recommendation to meet the PfR requirements,” added Kumarasamy.

Since Irevna BGP architecture involved multiple geographic locations and multiple ISPs, the Cisco partner and the design team then analyzed Irevna’s network architecture to come up with a PfR design which included positioning the two PfR components—Master Controller (MC) and Border Routers (BR).

The MC redundancy has been built to address MC’s single point of failures and its availability was addressed by using HSRP on edge routers. Apparently, PfR policies were applied globally in the BGP network to enable all the Internet-based applications to utilize the best-performing Internet path, based on defined PfR parameters.

Kumarasamy further pointed out that apart from this, we identified business-critical applications across locations and then applied unique policies based on combination of different parameters such as delay, utilization, etc. “After observing PfR behavior in the BGP network, we came to know that there is a huge difference from the plain BGP environment and the applications getting routed through best-performing ISP path, in terms of load distribution,” he added.

Meanwhile, Irevna made an investment of around Rs. 9 lakhs to build this solution. And the only challenge that the company faced during the implementation of this solution was that they were not able to deploy PfR using Fluke PfR Manager that resulted in delaying the whole process of deployment.

Reaping the benefits

At a time when companies strive to lower the cost of running their networks and increase the productivity of their end users with network applications, Irevna was able to use the network to handle any business needs related to Internet availability.

After observing the PfR behavior in the BGP network, Irevna saw a significant difference from the plain BGP environment in terms of load distribution and the applications that got routed through the best performing ISP path. As a corollary, Irevna was also able to offer a much higher SLA and secure environment to its customers and employees.

“In addition, the solution deployed was able to better resource utilization, transfer knowledge to their staff which enhanced skill-set, give them competitive advantage that opened up new market opportunities and increased the stability and availability of their network,” highlighted Kumarasamy.

Additionally, Virtual Switching System (VSS) technology has been implemented for the first time in LAN architecture, where all the modules would be in the active state even in virtual architecture. The VSS deployment has been implemented with the exclude interface methodology.

With this methodology, the critical servers would be retained access during the dual-active detection. Furthermore, this VSS technology allows for new enhancements in all areas of network design, including high availability, scalability, management and maintenance, as well high availability for all critical servers are attained through this deployment of VSS architecture.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com