Internet

Site to internet#

The Intelligent Network Fabric software stack can be used to create connections between lots of different locations.

As with traditional Wide Area Networks these networks can be entirely closed and private, or have transit hubs to other networks.

A connection to the internet (whether with local breakout from each edge EVX appliance, or centrally from a firewall cluster) is a common addition to the vast majority of business networks.

Options and types#

The same principles apply to all types of service edge connection:

• How much bandwidth?
• How resilient?
• What type of interconnect?
• Where/what is the security model?

Internet bandwidth is now one of the cheapest forms of available network bandwidth, and as such it is very cost effective to create resilient internet connectivity options for networks within datacentres.

Options exist for:

• <1 Gbit/s
• 1 Gbit/s
• 2 Gbit/s
• 5 Gbit/s
• 10 Gbit/s
• >10 Gbit/s

Spine and leaf topology#

As sites are spread across (usually) multiple datacentres in a network backbone, internet connections are usually scaled to be ready for a datacentre to fail, and have the need to cope with more site bandwidth than usual.

This notion of using all connections all of the time, and with automatic failover because each site is connected to multiple datacentres in a spine and leaf topology, means the over-engineering of core bandwidth in line with the needs of organisations taking into account failure scenarios.

If 2 Gbit/s is needed, then 2x 2 Gbit/s may be installed instead of 2x 1 Gbit/s so that when a datacentre fails, there is still enough bandwidth to serve users.