MAT MPLS Network

[Shadow_Walker]

Any MATS already implementing an MPLS network? Anyone have pros and cons for having one and anything to look out for.

[Katy]

Our trust used to run one, we since moved to normal Internet connections and running it all over VPNs. MPLS connections were loads more expensive and the way it was set up meant we had to have centralised filtering, fine until the trust grew a bit too big to cope with it. We're still on the same AD forest (child domain per school) just over VPN.

[ITManLT]

We used to run MPLS between my school and a new school that came on board. In principle it was fine, however a solutions architect higher up than me decided it would be perfectly fine to also run the backups over that link and everything.

Needless to say, we had a few failures.

 

The idea was that instead of both sites having say a call manager, and redundant WLAN controllers, they could split the costs and have 1 WLAN controller at each site in case the connection dropped etc.

 

The link didn't really seem to drop for anything, so just depends what you're planning on running over the link

[Achandler]

Not a MAT, but we have 7 offices all with internal fibres or EAD links between them and out to an MPLS to the Internet Breakout primarily, but also as a fail over should the EAD/ internal fibre links go down.

 

When I say internal fibre, I mean a fibre run through our own ducting underneath the pavements etc to other offices.

[localzuk]

We looked at it, but decided against. Instead, we have point to point lines with Exa. Basically leased lines that run from school to exchange to exchange to school. We have 1Gbps between all our sites, and the yearly price is around £2400 (the price is determined by the distance between the schools and exchange at each end. The distance between exchanges doesn't affect it.

 

We then have a normal leased line for breaking out to the internet.

[PotNoodleTech]

We looked at it, but decided against. Instead, we have point to point lines with Exa. Basically leased lines that run from school to exchange to exchange to school. We have 1Gbps between all our sites, and the yearly price is around £2400 (the price is determined by the distance between the schools and exchange at each end. The distance between exchanges doesn't affect it.

 

We then have a normal leased line for breaking out to the internet.

 

Wow 2400 per year for 1GB to the school seem like a great deal! I would have expected it to be more!

 

Out of interest how did you size your normal leased line, 1GB as well?

[localzuk]

Wow 2400 per year for 1GB to the school seem like a great deal! I would have expected it to be more!

Out of interest how did you size your normal leased line, 1GB as well?

The only expensive bit was the installation cost for the PTP links, but that's a one off of £5k ish per line.

 

We have a 1Gbps leased line, yeah. Covers our 6 schools/2000 users just fine, and allows us to do backups to Azure.

[m25man]

Any MATS already implementing an MPLS network? Anyone have pros and cons for having one and anything to look out for.

 

The only real problem for us was the Internet breakout.

As Internet Traffic can be really erratic and unpredictable we also had VoIP and CCTV to deal with as well.

Good QOS and traffic management, tweaking to make sure the MPLS is optimised for your requirements.

 

It sounds like a great idea but does take some careful planning and detailed design to avoid issues later.

 

We had 3 sites linked with MPLS with Internet breakout at site 1 with our own Firewall/Filtering.

Each site had several routed VLANs

 

It worked fine, however Internet use at any 1 site could often be affected by traffic conditions at the other 2 at specific times of day/week.

 

Your Internet breakout needs to be carefully considered and the Firewall solution capable of meeting the demands of all sites simultaneously or individual site breakouts which means complex routing table maintenance and configurations.

These can be extremely expensive and any ISP provided service proportionally so. So don’t over look that in your budgets.

 

Your providers MPLS specialist should be able to do this for you but they need accurate and detailed topology information of your existing systems to do so.

 

We now have dedicated Fibre Ethernet circuits linking sites with 2 x Gigabit Internet connections courtesy of BT.net

[Shadow_Walker]

Our trust used to run one, we since moved to normal Internet connections and running it all over VPNs. MPLS connections were loads more expensive and the way it was set up meant we had to have centralised filtering, fine until the trust grew a bit too big to cope with it. We're still on the same AD forest (child domain per school) just over VPN.

We currently have that solution of a star network so have all sites connected back to central servers over a VPN however looking at other alternatives now.

[TronXP]

We looked at it, but decided against. Instead, we have point to point lines with Exa. Basically leased lines that run from school to exchange to exchange to school. We have 1Gbps between all our sites, and the yearly price is around £2400 (the price is determined by the distance between the schools and exchange at each end. The distance between exchanges doesn't affect it.

 

We then have a normal leased line for breaking out to the internet.

 

This is exactly what we have. 1 GB Private circuit between the two sites at about the same price then a leased line internet circuit for internet

[Wave9_Lee]

MPLS is fine, but as others have said, there needs to be proper consideration of traffic flows, resilience and flexibility. The cost of MPLS is now much lower than it used to be, probably a premium of between 10 and 25% of direct internet circuits, so cost is less of a barrier. But you still need to consider why you would want to pay the premium. As most traffic these days is Internet bound and applications are increasingly cloud-hosted, then there's less need for inter-site traffic. I would generally say that MPLS is needed when S2S QOS is a must, and I guess this would be in the case of a central PBX and SIP all routed from one site - again, less requirement for this than before. Corporate networks can have legacy time-sensitive applications, or perhaps CCTV, that demand MPLS, but there are cheaper and more flexible ways to connect sites together for the (slightly) more standard education requirements.

 

Some downsides of MPLS:

More expensive

few options of telco

generally less control of firewall, changes routing etc

resilience is more costly

more single points of failure potentially

 

Some of these downsides exist in a local P2P (hub and spoke or daisychained) topology too.

 

Not to bore everyone (again!) but as a network manager I would be looking for as flexible, dynamic solution as possible to take account of predicted and unpredicted changes in IT strategy and application roadmap as possible. I would want as few hops or obstacles between my devices and the internet as possible. Can I make or action changes quickly?

 

MPLS has it's place. But I'm not sure it's in the education market.

[ordeology]

We are looking in to an SD-WAN link for a new school we are bringing on board. All our over schools use PTP connections however ours seem incredibly expensive compared to what @localzuk is paying pa