What Affects International MPLS Port Prices
According to TeleGeography, the world’s leading research firm on global international pricing trends: MPLS IP VPN port charges are generally lowest in major cities in the U.S. and Europe. The median monthly price of a 1.5-Mbps T-1 port in New York was $377, while the price per month of a slightly larger 2-Mbps E-1 port in […]
Can an IPSec VPN back-up my MPLS network?
So you want to use an IPSec VPN to backup your MPLS network. It can be done, with the right engineering. In the simplest terms: Use BGP between your network and your MPLS provider Run GRE tunnels between locations over the Internet VPN, with BGP routing across the tunnels. Set these tunnels to be a higher cost […]
SIP Trunking with your MPLS network
A google search (June 2009) on a ‘SIP Trunking’ returns ~500k references. From Wikipedia (replace ‘connection’ with Trunk) A SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) connection is a service offered by many ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) that connects a company’s PBX to the existing telephone system infrastructure (PSTN) via Internet using the SIP VoIP standard. This […]
Have you ever thought about wide area networks for Subway systems?
This post does not really relate to most of the others on this blog. But I just finished a meeting with some network architects for a subway (Metro) system located outside of the United States. What I learned was remarkable. I have changed some of the numbers to protect the privacy and security of the […]
What is VPLS?
VPLS stands for Virtual Private LAN Service, a means of providing Ethernet multi-point to multi-point communications over an IP MPLS network. This technology allows Local Area Networks to be interconnected and appear as a single Ethernet LAN. This allows geographically dispersed sites to share a single broadcast domain using pseudowires (see related blog entry). Advantages of VPLS: Lower latency Fast, secure and homogeneous network […]
How is traffic mapped on MPLS networks to CoS??
Network traffic is mapped to the desired Class of Service through the classification amd marking of packets. Traffic types are identified by: Source and/or destination network/hosts IP Addresses Source and/or destination Protocol Ports Traffic with premarked IP Precedence or DSCP bits. After the traffic is classified, the TOS byte must be marked with the appropriate […]
Policy Based Routing – MPLS and IPSec Network Optimization
When your company needs global MPLS network access, you are often faced with the cost/benefit paradigm: how big should each port be versus what you can afford. There are certain applications that clearly benefit from using an MPLS network over great distances: SAP, Oracle, VoIP, Video, Citrix. Then there are applications that really would do just fine […]
My network is slow. Why? Do you have network monitoring in place?
Network performance is always a hot topic to discuss. When performance slows, it is easy to blame the carrier. But often the problem is due to your own LAN or server applications. How can you figure out what the problem is? Unless you have centralized network monitoring installed on your network, you very likely will […]
Networking for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance
Effectively solving the problem of corporate Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity (DR/BC) starts with proper planning and networking. A company that owns only a few servers or a complete datacenter will need a failover location and plan known as the Run Book. The other location can be a collocation facility, another business location, other service […]
Cloud Computing and Denial of Service Attacks
We received a call the other day from the CTO of a collocation company that was in the midst of a Denial of Service attack on his network. While I have read articles about this subject, this was the first time that I had ever spoken to a CTO who was living through the nightmare. […]
