Dutch Provider Cuts BGP Convergence Times from Minutes to Seconds
When A2B Internet’s network began to struggle under a burgeoning number of routing tables, the provider installed a virtual routing foundation to speed things up.
“We were familiar with the capabilities of the MX Series routers, and once we’d seen the virtual MX in the lab, we decided to move it right into the production network. It brought us all the features and the stability of the MX Series and Junos operating system in a state-of-the-art virtual package.”
Erik Bais, Founder, A2B Internet
Overview
A2B Internet is a large, low-latency connectivity provider in the Netherlands that also provides IP address and routing management services. As customer traffic increased, the company sought a way to improve rerouting performance if a link were to fail.
Business Challenge
A2B’s customers demand high levels of stability and rapid convergence at an affordable price. Under the weight of business growth, network performance was straining to keep pace. To maintain its low-latency performance, A2B needed quicker routing table convergence, network automation, and a simpler way to implement IPv6 solutions.
Technology Solution
The provider installed vMX virtual routing from Juniper. The carrier-grade vMX router has separate control, forwarding, and management planes and runs the Juniper Networks Junos® operating system on standard servers using x86 chipsets. A2B Internet runs the vMX on an open-source hypervisor supported on a dedicated bare-metal server running the Linux Ubuntu operating system.
Business Results
A2B can converge a full routing table in 3 to 4 seconds, improving performance such that it is noticeable by customers. The company reports even faster convergence than with a dedicated hardware system, because it can scale routing table convergence independently from the underlying hardware platform.
“Adding the vMX to our network created a great way to add value in terms of network scale, performance, and redundancy, which are major reasons our clients rely on us.”
Erik Bais, Founder, A2B Internet
