Shadow VLAN's / additional resilience

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hello everyone,

 

I'd appreciate some constructive feedback from the community around carrier interconnect / data centre resiliency.

 

Currently, most leased lines and GEA / EoFTTC based connections terminate on a designated NNI / interconnect from the carrier into one of our data centres on a dedicated piece of fibre. If that NNI / interconnect fails then unless the customer has a backup line using another access technology e.g. ADSL or 4G then the leased line will go offline until the carrier fixes their interconnect.

 

It's rare this issue happens but it has in the past and I'm sure at some point will do again in the future no matter which underlying carrier is used.

 

We have multiple NNI's / interconnects to most carriers spanning numerous data centres

.

A shadow VLAN allows us to create another VLAN / backup data path which terminates on a different NNI / interconnect / physical piece of fibre. This can be in the same data centre of a different one. The advantage is that if a carrier NNI or the line card terminating the NNI on one of our Cisco routers fails then all traffic can automatically be re-routed to a different NNI / interconnect.

 

Traditionally this has cost us about £500 to setup and with an ongoing rental so whichever customers we've approached about using it haven't been interested due to school budget pressures.

 

However, I've just been informed that the costs have been significantly reduced and I expect we could offer this for about £20pm with free setup per circuit.

 

So to be clear this removes the below as single points of failure

 

NNI / Interconnect failure

Core Line card / router failure

 

I would love to be able to offer this FOC and bundle it into our leased line offerings but I suspect it wouldn't be appreciated by the masses and would just make our leased lines look more expensive that our competitors who don't.

 

I'd love to know your thoughts (particularly if you're a MAT using cloud based services) on if you'd see value in this or not.

 

Thanks

 

Dave