Metro Area Network
Our first case study covers from 2004 to 2007. The company declined to be named, so we will call them ACME Oil Company. ACME Oil Company in 2004 had one datacenter located near their headquarters in Houston, and about 2000 servers at this single datacenter. ACME wanted to grow their compute capacity from 2000 to 10000 over the next two years to keep up with demand for their services. Several things needed to change in order to do this. First the 2000 servers at the datacenter had to be available 24/7 to the employees. If these resources were not available the company could potentially be losing $10,000 or more an hour. This was a potential risk in the current situation. The employees depended upon a single dedicated circuit between the main office and the datacenter for access to the servers. Another potential risk was the single switch at the datacenter and at the main office. If either of these switches failed both the local network and the connection between the main office and the datacenter would be inoperable.
ACME Oil Company wanted a new solution to this problem that would give them insurance against potential failures, so the company could keep up with the growing demand for their services and be protected against unexpected failures. ACME Oil Company engaged Alpha One Network’s chief architect to come up with a design that would protect them against potential failure and provide the capacity to grow their business.
The design process took a month of careful consideration and planning. Every aspect of the network was reconsidered from network addresses to routing, and a plan was proposed. We would install two dedicated links to the datacenter. Each link would be an independent path so that if any point along that path were to be cut, the other path would be undisturbed. This took the addition of a second point of entry into the main office, and the datacenter. The next step was to install new long range 10GigE optics at both ends. At first these one line seemed to have too much signal loss to carry the signal, but after resplicing the line both sides of the link came up.
The next step was to test and verify failover, which was completed as expected. In some network designs a single link carries the traffic, and a secondary link is only utilized if the first fails. Our design provided the full available bandwidth of 20Gbit/sec to the datacenter, and continued to function at a reduced capacity of 10Gbit/sec in the event of failure or maintenance on either line.
The project was completed in May 2006, and the network continues to provide the absolute cutting-edge of performance in the Houston Metro Area.