We’ve completed an important phase of upgrading our connectivity in Sydney, which now has 3 live / production links to the Internet in Sydney, as well as a ‘back-channel’ link.
The crucial part here is that we’ve now enabled the full internal redistribution of known routes between our 3 x Border Routers, meaning that all Network Presence customers are now able to utilise peering connectivity for both incoming & outgoing data flows from their Network Presence service.
This means that customers can now push data out to networks that we ‘peer’ with, using the same gateway router from within our network which receives data from that peered network (symmetric data flows) and this maximises our customers’ use of the various Peering connections that Network Presence has, as well as provides multiple & redundant Internet connectivity for Network Presence, and is the “route mesh” that I refer to.
The best example of this ‘better’ routing is the outgoing data path from Network Presence to the AARNet national network, in that this “all routers have full knowledge of the paths available” means that we now use our gigabit path through to AARNet in Sydney and thus all Australian Universities and other academic or research institutions nationwide, providing a faster & ‘better’ route for Network Presence customers to deliver data to this network as an example.
The “N + 1 Routers” is the physical aspect of our routing redundancy, in that Network Presence always provisions an extra router chassis at its own built POPs (currently Sydney and Canberra in Australia). The aim here is that a physical router can fail and Network Presence will still be online, providing an internal layer of routing redundancy above & beyond the link/path redundancy achieved through a full mesh of our available routes across all routers.
The whole aim here is two-fold then, to provide fantastic Routing QoS, through having a number of different paths to the Internet and to maximise our ability to hand-off data to & from Australians by a high level of domestic national Peering connectivity, while also being able to automatically & quickly recover and survive any physical router failure too.
All to provide very high uptime & quality of networking for Network Presence customers.